PART 10: THE SAMSON OPTION ....THE CARTER MALAISE & AN ISRAELI TEST

THE SAMSON OPTION 

Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and 

American Foreign Policy

By Seymour M. Hersh

19 

The Carter Malaise 

The surprising victory of Menachem Begin's Likud Party in the May 1977 national elections ended twenty-nine years of Mapai and Labor Party domination of the political process in Israel. It brought to power a government that was even more committed than Labor to the Samson Option and the necessity of an Israeli nuclear arsenal. Begin and his political followers represented a populist-nationalist view of a greater Israel with a right to permanent control of the West Bank; in their view, the mainstream Zionists, represented by men such as David Ben-Gurion, had fought three major wars with no grand strategy. Israel's military aims were seen as having been dictated by the other side, whose leaders had chosen when and on which front war would begin. Begin and his coalition were determined—as they would demonstrate with disastrous effect in the 1982 Lebanon War—to use Israeli might to redraw the political map of the Middle East. 

Nuclear weapons appealed to another side of Begin's character—his fascination with dramatic military moves, as exemplified by his insistence on the bombing of Iraq's Osirak and his involvement, as a leader of Irgun, the underground Jewish terrorist organization, in the July 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem.* Unlike many Israelis who had immigrated from Eastern Europe, Begin had a hatred of Communism and the Soviet Union. He and his family had fled to eastern Poland after the 1939 German blitzkrieg and, like many Zionists, were arrested by Soviet troops and expelled to a Siberian gulag, only to be released into a hastily assembled Polish contingent of the Red Army after the 1941 Nazi invasion of Russia. 

*The hotel, which was the headquarters for the British military in Jerusalem, was destroyed after months of planning, following a major British sweep against the Jewish resistance movement in Palestine that resulted in many arrests and the capture of some weapons. The explosion killed eighty-two people, including forty Arabs and seventeen Jews, and led to international condemnation. The British responded a week later by hanging three suspected Irgun terrorists, and Begin, in turn, ordered the execution of two British sergeants held captive by Begin's terrorist organization; their bodies were booby-trapped and left hanging upside down, to the long-lasting horror of many Jews. 

By all accounts, Begin had never visited Dimona before becoming prime minister, nor was he especially well informed about it. His initial briefings on sensitive national security matters were provided by the outgoing prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin. Ari Ben-Menashe, a former Israeli signals intelligence expert then serving as a civilian official in the ministry of defense, recalled that Begin strongly endorsed Dimona's plans for the nuclear targeting of the Soviet Union. Begin went a step further, according to Ben-Menashe: "He gave orders to target more Soviet cities."* The increased targeting, Ben-Menashe said, created a heightened demand for American satellite intelligence. But Israeli military attaches and diplomats were running into a brick wall in Washington, as the Carter administration retreated from the intense relationship that had developed under Presidents Nixon and Ford. One American officer who was in charge of a military intelligence agency in the first years of the Carter presidency depicted the Israelis as being all over the Pentagon and preoccupied with intelligence on the Soviets: "They were buzzing around. They were trying to get into overhead and they also wanted to know what our [military] attaches were reporting and what our requirements were. Our establishment was like a honeycomb for them." 

*Ben-Menashe served more than ten years in the External Relations Department of the Israeli Defense Force, one of the most sensitive offices in Israel's intelligence community. He left the ministry in 1987, he said, to work directly for Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir as an adviser on intelligence affairs. He was arrested in 1989 in the United States on charges of conspiring to violate the Arms Export Control Act by attempting to sell Israeli-owned C-130 military aircraft to Iran; he was acquitted in November 1990 by a federal jury in New York City. During preliminary proceedings and the trial, the Israeli government provided a series of conflicting statements about Ben-Menashe, who claimed that the illegal sale had been sanctioned by his government and the United States. Israel initially told the court that it had no knowledge of BenMenashe. It later accused Ben-Menashe of forging the four letters of reference that he had obtained upon leaving his job in External Relations. After acknowledging that the letters were genuine, it then depicted Ben-Menashe as nothing more than a low-level translator for the Israeli intelligence community. Ben-Menashe, in turn, accused his government of betrayal after Israel insisted to the court that he had been moonlighting as an arms salesman, and he began to talk publicly about what he alleged was his involvement in hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of authorized arms sales to Iran in the early 1980s that had been secretly endorsed by the Reagan administration. He also accused Robert M. Gates, a senior CIA official under Reagan, of direct involvement, despite Israeli protests, in the sale of arms, including chemical weapons, to Iraq from 1986 to 1989. Ben-Menashe's allegations, which have been strongly denied in Washington and Jerusalem, were still under congressional review as of summer 1991. The author was initially contacted by Ben-Menashe in mid-1990 and began inter viewing him in Washington and elsewhere in early 1991 about the Israeli nuclear arsenal and his activities inside the Israeli signals intelligence establishment. Ben-Menashe agreed—as no other Israeli would—to be directly quoted by the author on nuclear issues and other matters. In June, he left America for exile in Australia. 

Begin's enthusiastic support for the targeting of the Soviet Union was not known to the American intelligence community, still obsessed with its efforts to prove that Zalman Shapiro had diverted uranium to Israel. There was no doubt inside the intelligence community that Israel had the bomb, and yet no one in Washington—not even the new administration of Jimmy Carter, the first to be seriously committed to nuclear nonproliferation—saw any reason to raise the issue. 

The Israeli government, worried about a backlash from its American supporters, continued to publicly deny the existence of any nuclear weapons—even when faced with evidence to the contrary. In 1976, after Carl Duckett inadvertently revealed in Washington that the CIA estimated Israel's arsenal to total at least ten warheads, U.S. Ambassador Malcolm Toon had been summoned by Yigal Allon, the foreign minister, to discuss the issue. "Allon was very disturbed over this development," Toon said in a cable to the State Department, "and felt it scarcely compatible with relationship between our two countries. . . . He asked rhetorically why CIA had done it." Toon reported that he dutifully explained to Allon that Duckett's remarks were supposed to have been off-the-record. He then asked Allon whether Duckett's conclusion was accurate: "Allon looked at me, somewhat startled," Toon reported, "and said, 'It is not true.'" 

Allon's bald denial rankled, and a year later, after Carter's election, Toon told a delegation of thirteen visiting American senators that he was sure Israel had the bomb. The senators, led by Abraham Ribicoff, Democrat of Connecticut, were on a fact-finding tour about the prospects for nonproliferation in the Middle East. They asked permission to inspect Dimona and were flatly told that no outsider had visited the reactor since the American inspections had ended in 1969, and none was wel come. Toon cabled the State Department about their treatment, complaining that "it was indecent for Israel to keep us out of Dimona." He vividly recalled the bureaucratic response: "Don't stir up the waters."* 

* Mordecai Vanunu, in one of his many interviews with the London Sunday Times, told of finding a newspaper clip about the rebuff of the senators derisively taped to a wall in Machon 2, the chemical separation plant at Dimona, when he began working there in August 1977.

The senators went much further than the State Department in attempting to paper over the fact that they had been denied entrance to the reactor. "This denial was dramatized by the press far beyond its actual significance," their subsequent public report noted. "Most of the delegation did not wish to visit Dimona because they lacked the technical expertise to make such a visit worthwhile. The delegation received no information as to whether Israel has nuclear weapons or not." 

The senators were especially sensitive to the issue, for Congress had just approved an amendment to the Arms Export Control Act making it illegal to provide U.S. foreign aid funds to those nations that sold or received nuclear reprocessing or enrichment materials, equipment, or technology. The amendment, as written, had no impact on those nations, such as Israel, which had been involved in the transfer or sale of nu clear materials prior to the bill's enactment. Israel, in other words, had been grandfathered out. The legislation, sponsored by Senator Stuart Symington, also provided for the President to override the law if he determined that the termination of such aid would be damaging to American national security.** The law has been applied two times to Pakistan, and to no other nation, since its approval. 

** Victor Gilinsky, the NRC commissioner, said he had been at a Washington dinner party shortly after the legislation was passed and listened intently as Symington made an informal speech about the importance of limiting the spread of nuclear weapons. "When he sat down," Gilinsky said, "I asked him, 'What about Israel?' 'Oh, they need it the senator responded. Tve been telling Dayan for thirty years they have to have the bomb" 

Congress and the White House were, in essence, acceding to what had become the arms control community's rationalization for its failure to raise questions about the Israeli bomb: Israel was no longer a proliferation problem—it had already proliferated. One ranking State Department intelligence official, whose testimony was crucial to the first Pakistani foreign aid cutoff, recalled his cynicism about the Symington legislation: "Did any of these guys [senators] who were grilling me so mercilessly about Pakistan ever ask about Israel?" A former Nuclear Regulatory Commission official, who was responsible for testimony on the NRCs position on Israeli compliance with the Symington Amendment, recalled his understanding that Congress "doesn't want to discover anything in an open hearing." Although he was personally convinced Israel had developed nuclear arms, the official said that he repeatedly testified that he had "no evidence" of such weapons existing in Israel. If there were any significant items of information that needed to be passed along, the official added, "you told them over coffee. Never at an open hearing." 

America's tolerance for a nuclear-armed Israel may not have troubled the Congress or the media, but it rankled Pakistan's President Mohammad Zia ul-Haq. George H. Rathjens, a deputy early in the Carter administration to Gerard C. Smith, the President's specially appointed ambassador-at-large for nonproliferation issues, vividly recalled Zia's response when Smith raised questions about Pakistan's nuclear program: " 'Why don't you people talk to Israel?' Smith was upset," Rathjens added, "but there was no way to answer Zia—no satisfactory answer." The Israeli nuclear program "wasn't anything people in the U.S. government wanted to talk about or discuss," Rathjens said. "It was an embarrassment." 

Cooperation between Israel and South Africa on nuclear issues began in earnest after the 1967 Six-Day War when Israel, re buffed by Charles de Gaulle, was forced to look elsewhere for support. Pierre Pean, in Les deux bombes, told of the surprising encounter in Johannesburg in 1967 between a French nuclear scientist who had been at Dimona and a group of Israeli nuclear scientists who had worked ten years earlier with the French at Saclay and Marcoule. The French physicist and his colleagues had helped the Israelis learn skills that they were now passing along to the South Africans. Israel was trading its expertise in nuclear physics for the uranium ore and other strategic minerals that existed in abundance in South Africa. The South Africans needed all the technical support they could get, recalled Ari Ben-Menashe: "They weren't good at all as a nu clear state. We had to help all the way." 

In 1968, Ernst David Bergmann, out of office in Israel but still influential on nuclear issues, traveled to South Africa, where he spoke publicly on the "move toward international collaboration" on nuclear issues. In a speech to the South African Institute of International Affairs in Johannesburg, Bergmann said nothing about nuclear weapons, but talked candidly about the "common problem" facing Israel and South Africa: "Neither of us has neighbors to whom we can speak and to whom we are going to be able to speak in the near future. If we are in this position of isolation, perhaps it might be best for both countries to speak to each other." 

Bergmann's talk of isolation seemed prophetic as all but three black African states (Malawi, Lesotho, and Swaziland) broke diplomatic relations with Israel in the wake of the 1973 Yom Kippur War and Israel's continued insistence on holding on to the occupied territories. Many of Israel's former allies in Africa increasingly began to support Palestinian aspirations. In November 1975, the United Nations General Assembly voted seventy-two to thirty-five (with thirty-two abstentions) in favor of a resolution that defined Zionism as "a form of racism and racial discrimination." Israeli Ambassador Chaim Herzog responded by accusing the United Nations of becoming "the world center of anti-Semitism." 

Israel and South Africa, two "pariah" states, had turned to each other with renewed trading and arms sales after the war; within three years, joint trade grew from $30 million to $100 million a year. South Africa's small but influential Jewish population of 118,000 were always large contributors to Israeli bond drives and charities; now they also became more vocal in their support for Israel's more conservative political parties, including Menachem Begin's Likud Party. In 1974, Defense Minister Moshe Dayan had made a secret trip to Pretoria, where, ac cording to Ari Ben-Menashe, he discussed the possibility of an Israeli nuclear test on South African soil. Dayan left the Israeli cabinet a few months later, when Yitzhak Rabin became prime minister, but continuity on key Israeli-South African defense and nuclear issues was assured with Rabin's appointment of Shimon Peres to the defense portfolio. Two years later, Prime Minister John Vorster, who had sided with Germany during World War II, visited Israel—the first official state visit by a South African prime minister in Israel's history.* 

*The April 1976 visit was denounced by the Organization of African States (OAS) and the Cairo-based Arab League, as well as by the Soviet Union and the Netherlands. 

Peres made at least one private trip to Pretoria before the Vorster visit, just as he had made private trips to France twenty years earlier to arrange for arms and nuclear cooperation. His agenda included nuclear testing—the issue initially raised by Moshe Dayan—and he won a commitment in principle from John Vorster, according to Ben-Menashe, for a series of joint Israeli-South African tests in South Africa. Vorster's highly publicized visit to Israel resulted in a renewal of full diplomatic relations, as well as secret arms transfer agreements that would enable the two countries, working together in defiance of international opinion and United Nations sanctions, to emerge by the early 1980s as economies that were highly dependent on foreign arms sales. 

Israeli sources put the number of secret military and nuclear understandings between Israel and South Africa at "six or seven" by the end of the Vorster visit. "Why?" a former Israeli official asked rhetorically. He cited four reasons. "One: to share basic resources. South Africa is a very rich country and Israel is poor. Two: the supply of raw materials. Three: testing grounds. Try to do a [nuclear] test in Israel and all hell breaks loose. In South Africa it's different. Four: there is a certain sympathy for the situation of South Africa among Israelis. They are also European settlers standing against a hostile world. 

"South Africa, when it realized it wanted to go nuclear, also realized there was one country it could turn to," added the Israeli, who has firsthand knowledge of Israel's nuclear policy. 

The issue of Israel's nuclear arms remained in the background in the first years of the Carter administration, whose major priorities included a Middle East solution. The nuclear intelligence experts at Los Alamos and Livermore had been trying to monitor the shipment of uranium ore from South Africa to Israel since the early 1960s, but simply failed to see, or failed to understand, the full scope of South Africa's continuing efforts in nuclear technology. In 1970, Prime Minister John Vorster informed Parliament that the nation's nuclear scientists had developed a unique uranium enrichment process involving jet nozzle enrichment and a sophisticated cascade technique. Within a few years, South Africa began construction of a pilot plant for the production of enriched uranium, not subject to IAEA safeguards, at a plant called Valindaba near Pretoria.* 

* The plant's name, Valindaba, hints at its real purpose: it means "the council is closed" or "the talking is over" in the local African Sotho dialect. 

The American intelligence community knew nothing of the secret negotiations between Vorster and Peres, but there were a few analysts who knew something was up between the two nations. By the mid-1970s, one American official recalled, "the South Africans and Israel were suddenly doing things in such a different way that it took us by surprise. They went from the drawing board to the production of enriched uranium. They leapfrogged us in production design and output and we weren't looking in the right places." The official's point was that the nuclear production process in the United States was so huge and unwieldy that innovations were difficult to achieve; any new process would be tested for years in pilot production before being adopted in the government's main weapons assembly line near Amarillo, Texas, which is capable of producing five thousand or more warheads a year. 

By the mid-1970s, South Africa considered itself in an analogous position to that faced by Israel after 1967: it was fighting an internal war against the African National Congress and the anti-apartheid movement as well as a war of secession in Namibia, and an external war against the growing black nationalism and emerging independence of Angola and Mozambique in the frontline states of southern Africa. In the long run, the military prospects of South Africa were bleak: the leaders of South Africa saw themselves, as did the men running Israel, to be vastly outnumbered by their enemies. 

There was security, so the Afrikaners believed, in the nuclear bomb. And, like Israel, South Africa would need a weapon—a low-yield nuclear artillery shell—that could be used in case frontline defenses were breached and urban centers threatened. In August 1977, Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev privately warned the Carter administration that his nation's Cosmos satellite system had detected evidence of South African preparations for a nuclear test, or series of tests, at what was determined to be an underground site in the Kalahari. Similar warnings were sent to Britain, France, and West Germany, all participants—with the Soviets and the United States—in a 1975 conference in London that had set up the Nuclear Suppliers Group, which established a series of voluntary guidelines for limiting technical and material aid to non-nuclear nations.* 

*Third World nations, not without reason, accused the Nuclear Suppliers Group— convened after India's 1974 nuclear test—of instituting what amounted to an international cartel to perpetuate the advanced positions of the major powers; there were further claims that the agreements violated the promise given to non-nuclear states in Article Six of the Nonproliferation Treaty, which explicitly calls on all parties to facilitate "the fullest possible exchange of equipment, materials and scientific and technological information for the peaceful uses of nuclear energy." The NPT also called for special attention to the "needs of the developing areas of the world." 

An American satellite was immediately routed over the Kalahari and saw the classic signs of preparations for an underground nuclear test—a test hole had been dug with casing around it, an observation tower had been put up, and the many cables needed for measurement were in place. Carter and Brezhnev, working together, led an international campaign of protest, and the South African government, facing the loss of diplomatic relations, backed down by the end of August. Carter publicly announced that "South Africa has informed us that they do not have and do not intend to develop nuclear explosive devices for any purpose, either peaceful or as a weapon." The President also said he had been assured that the Kalahari test site "is not designed ... to test nuclear explosives, and that no nuclear explosive test will be taken in South Africa now or in the future." 

The White House, jubilant over its first major foreign policy success, arranged for a series of elaborate briefings to the news media about the intricacies of its successful diplomacy. The reporters were not told, however, that the CIA had reported that Israeli military personnel, in civilian clothes, were all over the Kalahari test site, and being "quite open about it," as a CIA officer recalled. The press also was not told that a senior South African diplomat had privately assured the United States at the height of the crisis in early August that his military was not planning to test a long-range missile, but only "a rocket or artillery round—something like that." 

The CIA would later conclude, in a formal assessment for the White House, that the strong international protests over Kalahari had deflected South Africa "at least temporarily" from carrying out its planned test. Israelis, added the CIA assessment, have "participated in certain South African nuclear research activities over the last few years. . . ." 

Carter's heavily promoted diplomatic "victory in the desert" was far less significant than it appeared; a real triumph would have involved going a step further and taking on the Israeli nuclear program, and no one in the Carter White House had the stomach for that. 

It was into this Washington that an Israeli with inside information about Dimona—seeking to trade that information for personal advancement—arrived late in the year. He contacted a senior official in the American nuclear intelligence community with whom he had dealt professionally in the past, and immediately revealed the fact that Israel had assembled well over one hundred nuclear warheads. There would be more than two hundred warheads, many of them low-yield devices, by the year 1980, the Israeli added. The American official, who is Jewish, understood why the Israeli was willing to talk: "He was a technical person looking for favors. This guy wanted to be come a U.S. citizen." The fact that Israel had nuclear weapons, the American rationalized, was "general knowledge throughout the U.S. government. My feeling was this one individual wanted to hustle information for personal advantage. I decided to ignore it." 

And so he did not forward the information to his superiors and colleagues, although he had no doubt that the information was accurate. The American said he knew of Israelis in other technical fields, apparently dismayed by the election of Begin, who had approached their American counterparts with offers to trade information and intelligence for a chance to emigrate to the United States. 

There were other, and more traditional, approaches, as the relationship between Jimmy Carter and Menachem Begin be came increasingly strained in the wake of Camp David, and as some Israeli officials tried—apparently without high-level approval—to get some strategic help for Israeli ambitions and put an end to America's refusal to recognize the reality of the Israeli nuclear arsenal. 

Their starting point was an appropriately obscure corner of the Pentagon known as the Office of Net Assessments, whose director, Andrew W. Marshall, a former Rand Corporation analyst, has been providing secretaries of defense with an independent flow of intelligence and analysis for two decades. In the last months of the Ford administration, Marshall won acceptance of a plan to begin a strategic dialogue with Israel; one goal was to investigate a possible cooperative U.S.-Israeli defense treaty. Some of Israel's most sophisticated strategic thinkers were assigned by Prime Minister Rabin to the ad hoc group, including Avraham Tamir, an Israeli Army general who would later serve as director general of the foreign minis try. It was Tamir, one member of the Marshall group recalled, who repeatedly sought to discuss nuclear issues after Anwar Sadat's dramatic visit to Jerusalem in November 1977, the first step toward the Camp David talks.* The question was: would Marshall and his Defense Department staff discuss contingency plans for joint nuclear targeting of southern Russia in case of war? 

*Sadat met privately with Begin shortly after arriving in Jerusalem, and, according to Israeli officials, his first questions dealt with the Israeli nuclear arsenal. One Israeli who has seen a high-level summary of the Begin-Sadat meeting said that the Egyptian leader sought assurances that Israel would pledge not to use nuclear weapons against Egypt if a peace treaty between the two nations was signed. Begin did not reply, according to the Israeli account. 

That question was super sensitive, as all involved understood —America was still officially accepting Israeli assurances it had no nuclear arms—and it was referred in writing on at least two occasions to Secretary of Defense Harold Brown for guidance. The answer, in both cases, came back quickly: there was to be no discussion of nuclear doctrine by Marshall's shop. 

Brown, interviewed later about Tamir's initiative, at first dismissed it as another example of the need for military planners to make contingency plans. He then spoke hypothetically: "If such a request did come to me, it didn't take me long to think about it." He finally acknowledged that he had rejected the Israeli approach without discussing it with President Carter. The Carter administration, Brown asserted, "would not have wanted to get involved in an Israeli-Soviet conflict. The whole idea of Israel becoming our asset seems crazy to me. The Israelis would say, 'Let us help you,' and then you end up being their tool. The Israelis have their own security interests and we have our interests. They are not identical." Andrew Marshall and his colleagues in the Office of Net Assessments viewed Brown's position as—as one American put it—"a foolish constraint," but followed his instructions and, of course, told no one else in the U.S. government about the Israeli request for joint nuclear targeting.* 

* A senior American intelligence official recalled that the French had occasionally made similar requests to the Pentagon for joint nuclear targeting and intelligence sharing and invariably been rejected out of hand, without the issue being raised at the secretary of defense level, as was done with Avraham Tamir's proposal. "It was manifest that no one was afraid of the French," the official said, "but they were afraid of the Israelis. We all knew the French didn't have a back-door relationship" with the White House, as Israel did

It was another disconnect as the American bureaucracy instinctively continued to protect its President from learning the facts about the Israeli nuclear capability—and from having to act on that knowledge. That instinct reached its height in the fall of 1979, when the Israelis and the South Africans finally pulled off their test. 

20 

An Israeli Test 

Just before dawn on the stormy morning of September 22,1979, the clouds over the South Indian Ocean suddenly broke and an American satellite was able to record two distinctive bright flashes of light within a fraction of a second—probable evidence of a nuclear explosion. The nuclear detection satellite, known as vela, had seen similar flashes of light on forty-one previous occasions, and in each case it was subsequently deter mined that a nuclear explosion had taken place. Most of the sightings were over Lap Nor, where the Chinese atmospheric nuclear tests took place, or in the South Pacific, site of the French tests. There were a few intelligence officials and nonproliferation experts in the Carter administration who immediately concluded that Israel and South Africa had finally conducted a nuclear test, a test that they had tried, and failed, to accomplish two years earlier. 

They were right. 

Former Israeli government officials, whose information on other aspects of Dimona's activities has been corroborated, said that the warhead tested that Saturday morning was a low-yield nuclear artillery shell that had been standardized for use by the Israeli Defense Force. The Israeli sources also said the event captured by the vela satellite was not the first but the third test of a nuclear device over the Indian Ocean. At least two Israeli Navy ships had sailed to the site in advance, and a contingent of Israeli military men and nuclear experts—along with the South African Navy—was observing the tests. "We wouldn't send ships down there for one test," one Israeli said. "It was a fuck-up," he added, referring to the capture of a test by the vela satellite. "There was a storm and we figured it would block vela, but there was a gap in the weather—a window— and vela got blinded by the flash." [Even though we have it from the horse's mouth,that stawalt of the 'progressives';wikipedia chooses deception D.C]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vela_(satellite)

The vela satellite, as it was programmed to do, digitally relayed its sighting to the headquarters of the Air Force Technical Applications Center (AFTAC) at Patrick Air Force Base in Cape Canaveral, Florida; it was Friday night, September 21, on the East Coast. Once evaluated and confirmed, the intelligence was routed, via the Defense Intelligence Agency, to the Pentagon's National Military Command Center and relayed to America's top civilian and military leaders. The nuclear event was estimated to have taken place off the coast of Prince Edward Island, about fifteen hundred miles southeast of the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa, halfway to Antarctica. The intelligence was at the top of the CIA's and DIA's Saturday morning briefing for President Carter and his national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski. 

Gerald G. Oplinger, Brzezinski's aide for global issues, was spending the early fall weekend at his summer house at Deep Creek Lake, Maryland, when word of the possible test came: he was summoned back to an urgent meeting in the White House situation room. Oplinger had retired from the Foreign Service and worked at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission before joining Brzezinski's staff; he was familiar with the vela program and knew that its previous sightings of Chinese and French atmospheric tests had been unfailingly accurate. "Everybody showed up," Oplinger recalled, meaning that Brzezinski was at the meeting, "and we went around and asked, 'Was it a test?' CIA and DIA said that odds were at least ninety percent that it had been a nuclear explosion." Oplinger personally had no doubt, as he recalled: "Common sense told me that there was a high probability that it was what it was—it was just too incredible." 

"People just stood there, paralyzed," recalled Spurgeon M. Keeny, Jr., deputy director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA), a senior bureaucrat who had been involved in high-level scientific issues since the Eisenhower administration. Keeny realized, he said, that he and his colleagues "needed to buy some time. Even if a test was done, we didn't know who did it. This was a serious matter." Keeny also was troubled by the intelligence community's assurances that its assessment was 90 percent accurate. In his view, the CIA and DIA officials at the situation-room meeting surely could not know all the facts: "They were middle-level bureaucrats relaying data." 

In Keeny's account, it was his idea to set up an outside panel to study the vela data and ensure that the satellite had not made an error—one with enormous political consequences. Jerry Oplinger had a different recollection: "The meeting was going nowhere and Frank Press [the presidential science adviser] said, 'Let's convene an unbiased outside study.'" Oplinger had no illusions about what Frank Press meant: "Press kept on asking, 'What do we do if it leaks out that we've concluded it was a test?' He did not want that panel to conclude there had been a nuclear explosion." Brzezinski had little to say during the meeting, Oplinger recalled.*

* Brzezinski, according to his aides, was never particularly interested in proliferation or nuclear-fuel-cycle issues. President Carter had triggered an uproar by continuing President Ford's 1976 ban on the commercial reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel for power reactors. Carter's action, based on environmental and proliferation concerns, was viewed by the American nuclear power industry as a foolish move that would stifle the sale of American reactors and equipment around the world. His NSC aides weren't convinced that Brzezinski fully understood the issue. At one stage early in the administration, Oplinger recalled being told, Brzezinski agreed to a briefing by Jessica Tuchman, Oplinger's predecessor on the NSC staff, and stood by as she described the nuclear fuel cycle, beginning with the insertion of nuclear fuel into a reactor and ending with the reprocessing of the spent fuel. "Zbig listened to all this," Oplinger related, "and then asked, 'Okay, now tell me—where does the energy come from?'" Brzezinski did not mention the vela incident in his 1983 memoir Power and Principle. 

 [Of course not,because if They decided on a test,next they would have to go to who's test.This incident is a prime example of why the CIA(under their guise of for 'national security)should be put to bed.If they were REALLY about intelligence and the nation's interests,they would have been all over this,but they chose politic's over the people and continue in this manner right to this very day.DO NOT get it twisted,this rogue element that has grown out of the CIA, is 100% at fault for the countries immigration problem in the South.In a coming post I will show you this in more detail D.C]

Frank Press, a seismologist who had worked for years on classified nuclear detection issues, knew the vela program far better than any of his peers in the White House. He knew that the satellites were ancient by satellite standards—some having been launched in the early 1960s—and were constantly being updated and analyzed by scientists at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratories, who had helped design the system, to ensure that no deterioration had set in. There had been, in fact, recent concern about false alarms that could trigger a phony intelligence report. The outside panel was a natural step, one that would indeed buy some time, and one that would also add a patina of legitimacy to the delaying effort. Meanwhile, existence of the vela sighting became one of the most important secrets of the Carter administration. 

The officials at the top of the troubled Carter administration knew that public revelation of the vela sighting, with its strong inference of an illicit Israeli-South African test, would create a horrible dilemma for the President, just a few months away from the 1980 presidential campaign. Carter had draped himself in the flag of nonproliferation, and if he did not get tough with the two pariah nations, he would be criticized for hypocrisy; if he did seek sanctions, there would be political hell to pay. "When that thing up there went 'Twinkle, twinkle, little star,' " recalled Hodding Carter III, then the assistant secretary of state for public affairs, "I can remember running around on the seventh floor," where Secretary of State Cyrus R. Vance's office was located. "There was sheer panic," Carter said. "It was very much 'Oh, shit. Oh, dear. What do we do with this?'" [Well clearly that amounted to anything OTHER then admitting the Truth,myself personally,I think that is becoming a big time problem with our elected 'officials' D.C]

"We were in the worst possible position," another government official recalled. "Here we are, ready to send the SALT treaty up to the Senate, and we know there's been a violation of the [1963] test ban treaty and we can't prove it and we can't pin it on anyone. There was a very immediate strategic imperative to make this thing go away." The official, who had access to all of the available intelligence on the vela sighting, said it was evident that the satellite had observed what "could only be a nuclear event. Our capturing it fortuitously was an embarrassment, a big political problem, and there were a lot of people who wanted to obscure the event." 

The American policy in Iran was in chaos, with the ailing shah—who had been so warmly toasted two years earlier by Jimmy Carter—in Mexico and pleading for admission to the United States.* There had been a stupendous intelligence gaffe just a few weeks before over a breathtaking report suggesting that a Soviet brigade had moved into Cuba, presenting a direct challenge to Carter, just as the Soviets had challenged John F. Kennedy in 1962. The intelligence leaked, and the administration, taking the hard line in public, demanded that the Soviets remove their troops. It turned out not to be a triumphant Cuban missile crisis, however, as embarrassed Carter officials were forced to acknowledge that their initial intelligence re port was simply wrong: Soviet soldiers had been in Cuba since the early 1960s. Adding to the mortification was the fact that the administration was then preparing for what was sure to be a bitter fight with Senate Republicans over the U.S. government's ability to verify the June 1979 SALT II agreements. The SALT agreement plus Carter's success at Camp David were scheduled to be featured in his reelection campaign. 

* The shah was admitted for medical treatment into the United States on October 22, triggering a renewed wave of anti-American rioting in Tehran and the eventual seizure of the American embassy on November 4, beginning Jimmy Carter's hostage nightmare. During the tense discussions before the shah's arrival, recalled Nicholas Veliotes, then serving as the assistant secretary of state for Near East and South Asian affairs, the ousted leader confided that he had been negotiating with the Israelis for the purchase of long-range missiles capable of firing a nuclear warhead. "He said that the Israelis had told him not to tell us," Veliotes added. Veliotes's information, like most intelligence data about Israeli nuclear intentions, was not made known to other American officials. 

An Israeli bomb threatened all this and made it imperative that the American President, once again, not know what there was to know. The American bureaucracy had been in training for more than thirty years in looking the other way when it came to the Israeli nuclear program, and every part of the system instinctively sought to find a way to avoid calling the Israeli-South African test a test. 

There was widespread knowledge of the test in Israel. Ari BenMenashe recalled seeing correspondence on the issue in his ministry of defense office shortly after Menachem Begin's election in 1977. It was widely assumed that there had been some secret diplomacy between former Defense Minister Shimon Peres and John Vorster during Peres's visit to South Africa in 1976, but just what commitments had been made were not widely known inside the Israeli government. It was also under stood, Ben-Menashe said, that Peres was not going to tell Menachem Begin about it. And Begin, in turn, would not directly approach Peres, who—along with David Ben-Gurion— had treated him with contempt and ridicule throughout his career. Begin's solution was to dispatch Ezer Weizman, the newly appointed minister of defense, to South Africa. Weizman's mission, said Ben-Menashe, was "just to find out what was going on." 

"Weizman came back," Ben-Menashe recalled, "and said, 'We've promised these guys nuclear warheads.' He recommended to Begin that they pay up and carry out the promise." Ben-Menashe said he and others in External Relations understood that Begin responded by saying, in effect, "Yes. Do it!" 

Another Israeli, who also had direct access to defense ministry information about the test in South Africa, said that Weizman signed an agreement before the 1979 tests calling for the sale to South Africa of technology and equipment needed for the manufacture of low-yield 175mm and 203mm nuclear artillery shells. Weizman's order triggered an internal dispute with senior nuclear officials, the Israeli recalled, who protested the government's decision to sell the information, considered by the men running Dimona to be "the best stuff we got."* 
*After the 1973 war, the Israeli Defense Force established at least three nuclear capable artillery battalions, each containing twelve self-propelled 175mm cannons. The battalions were considered part of Israel's strategic reserve and operated under stream lined command-and-control: nuclear shells could be fired on the direct orders of the prime minister, as relayed through the minister of defense, the Army Chief of Staff, and the chief of operations directly to the artillery battalion commander. Clearance was not required, as in normal operations, from any officer at the regional headquarters, corps, division, or brigade level. Former Israeli army officers said at least three nuclear artillery shells eventually were stockpiled for each weapon—a total of 108 warheads. Additional warheads were supplied for Israel's 203mm cannons.
Frank Press finally settled on Jack P. Ruina, a professor of electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to direct the outside panel and determine whether some of Israel's "best stuff" had ended up over the South Indian Ocean. It was a perfect choice, in terms of discretion: Ruina, a longtime consultant to the Pentagon on military and scientific issues, held many of the most sensitive clearances in the American military and scientific community; he had served as director in the early 1960s of the Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA), the Pentagon's research arm, and later directed the Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA), the Pentagon's most important think tank. Ruina was an honorable and cautious man who could be counted on to follow orders and not talk to reporters, especially after his hush-hush introduction to the White House crisis. "Press called and asked me to come on down [to the White House]," Ruina recalled. "He said, 'I can't talk about it on the phone. Just come on down.' " 

Within weeks, as the White House's secret continued to hold, Press and Ruina picked an ad hoc panel of eight distinguished scientists, whose integrity was beyond reproach. Ruina's key colleagues included Luis Alvarez, of the physics department at the University of California, a Nobel laureate; Wolfgang K. H. Panofsky, of Stanford University's Linear Accelerator Center; and Richard L. Garwin, of IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center. Panofsky and Garwin had served often as government consultants and were known for their independence. 

The panel's assignment, carefully drawn up by Spurgeon Keeny and Frank Press, was weighted, to no one's surprise, toward a thorough investigation into the possibility that the vela sighting had been a false alarm. The Ruina panel was also told to investigate the possibility that the recorded signal "was of natural origin, possibly resulting from the coincidence of two or more natural phenomena. ..." 

Ruina was clear about the limits on his assignment. "My mandate was to only look at technical data," he recalled. He and his colleagues were provided with all of the available intelligence about the vela sighting, Ruina said, "but we didn't include any political data—like are the Israelis interested in nuclear weapons? That was not in our charter." The panel members were comfortable with their mandate: purely technical studies were a way of life for scientific consultants to the government.[So basically a whitewash of the data D.C] 

Despite its explosiveness, knowledge of the vela report remained a closely held secret for more than a month, until ABC television reporter John Scali was told by an old friend about a simulated Soviet nuclear attack on the United States that had been missed by America's early warning system. The old friend was very conservative, Scali recalled, and he thought the American failure "was an outrage." Scali, who had been the ambassador to the United Nations under Nixon, ran the story by another old friend in the Pentagon. Within hours, he was summoned to the office of a senior Defense Department official who gave him the essential facts.* He broadcast his story on the evening of October 25: the secret had held for more than a month, long enough for the White House to have its cover story ready. Its spokesmen immediately informed the news media that there was "no confirmation" of a test. 
* Carter, with his emphasis on nonproliferation and human rights, was less than popular at the Pentagon. 

Secretary of State Vance, following the company line, also told journalists there was no conclusive evidence of a test, and South Africa issued a heated denial.** "Faced with a denial by South Africa of such nuclear activity," dutifully wrote the New York Times, "and lacking any proof beyond the uncorroborated evidence of a single satellite, the United States Government sought to avoid a major confrontation over what it said was only the possibility that some nation had secretly exploded a nuclear device in an area of some 4,500 square miles. . . ." Vance further told the press that within hours of the first vela signal, he had discussed the matter with Brzezinski and Defense Secretary Harold Brown. 

** One of the strangest denials to emerge from the controversy came from South African Vice Admiral J. C. Walters, who made public a statement suggesting that the flash could have been caused by an accident aboard a Soviet nuclear submarine. The admiral's statement, which said that Soviet involvement was "a real possibility," was reported by the New York Times to have been issued with the approval of Prime Minister P. W. Botha, who also was South Africa's minister of defense. The admiral offered no factual basis for his Cold War assertion, which soon sank from sight. 
None of the reporters knew, of course, that Harold Brown's Office of Net Assessments had already been approached two times by a senior Israeli official seeking to discuss joint U.S.- Israeli strategic targeting of the Soviet Union. Did Brown tell Cyrus Vance at the time about the nuclear approach, or, for that matter, did he report it to the President and his national security adviser? Did anyone in the U.S. government review the intelligence files on the planned 1977 South African test in the Kalahari? Did any of the senior White House officials won der why a flotilla of South African and Israeli military ships had been tracked by the National Security Agency and other elements of the intelligence community to a site fifteen hundred miles off the coast of South Africa?✟ 
✟Victor Gilinsky, still serving in 1979 on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, recalled inquiring during an official briefing whether there were ships in the Indian Ocean and being told no. He learned the next day that there indeed had been ships there. Gilinsky wasn't surprised when the Ruina panel concluded that no nuclear test probably had taken place: "Everyone took the bureaucratically appropriate decision." 

And, finally, did anyone notice what Prime Minister P. W. Botha had to say on September 25,1979, three days after the test —three days in which there had been no international com ment or outcry? Botha had reason to believe that his nation and its Israeli partners had pulled it off. There was a swagger in his remarks before a meeting of the Cape National Party congress as he warned, according to the Rand Daily Mail, that South Africa had and could produce sufficient arms to counter terror ism—an obvious reference to the African National Congress (ANC), leaders of the anti-apartheid movement. "If there are people who are thinking of doing something else," the newspaper quoted Botha as saying, "I suggest they think twice about it. They might find out we have military weapons they do not know about." 

The Ruina panel members would spend months effectively poking holes in and raising legitimate questions about the reliability and integrity of the vela satellite system. The panel chose to concentrate on what became known as the "false alarm" issue. Nuclear explosions produce two distinctly characteristic and separate flashes of light—from the initial detonation and the subsequent fireball about one third of a second later—that are recorded as double humps on a graph by the vela satellite. The panel was troubled by the anomalies it found in the double humps as recorded on September 22 and concluded, as it stated in its final report, that the vela sighting "contains sufficient internal inconsistency to cast serious doubt whether that signal originated from a nuclear explosion or in fact from any light sources in the proximity of the vela satellite." The panel also could find no collateral signs of a nuclear event—seismic signals, acoustic waves, ionospheric disturbances, magnetic or electromagnetic pulses that had accompanied previous vela reports. No significant radioactive fallout or other debris was located; there was no "smoking gun" that made the panel's conclusion ineluctable. The lack of such findings was not unusual in itself, given the low yield of the test and its isolated location; Press and the panel members knew that U.S. government seismologists had long suspected the Soviets had conducted many low-yield tests in the 1950s and 1960s that were not detected by the available American systems. 

The panel eventually reported in July 1980, ten months after the event, that the flash observed by the satellite "was probably not from a nuclear explosion. Although we cannot rule out the possibility that this signal was of nuclear origin," the unclassified version of the ad hoc report said, "the panel considers it more likely that the signal was one of the zoo events [a signal of unknown cause], possibly a consequence of the impact of a small meteoroid on the satellite." 

The findings outraged the nuclear scientists and professional bomb makers of Los Alamos, who had designed the vela system. Many of these men were members of the Nuclear Intelligence Panel (NIP), the most highly classified nuclear intelligence group in the U.S. government. NIP had done its own investigation into the vela test, and had been ordered by the White House—citing national security—not to discuss it publicly. 

Its finding, openly discussed by NIP members in interviews with the author, was that a low-yield nuclear weapon most certainly had been detonated on September 22. They were dismayed by the extent of White House interference in the investigation. "If it looks like a duck, it's got to be a duck," said Harold M. Agnew, a NIP member and director of the Los Alamos laboratory from 1970 to 1979. "But that wasn't an answer Carter liked." The overriding issue, in Agnew's view, was not whether a nuclear bomb was exploded, but "Who did it?" Another panel member, Louis H. Roddis, Jr., who played a major role in America's postwar nuclear weapons development, concluded that the South African-Israeli test had taken place on a barge, or on one of the islands in the South Indian Ocean archipelago. He, too, expressed anger at Frank Press and the White House."There was a real effort on the part of the administration to downplay it," Roddis said. "They were, in deed, concealing the facts—manipulating the facts. Everybody in New Mexico was convinced that it was a test." [Again this just proves that national security in the real sense means nothing,the national security these people are always pulling out in the name of silence on any given subject,is really their own security they are worried about if the truth comes out. DC]

The secret NIP study was directed by Donald M. Kerr, Jr., who had served in the Carter administration as acting director  of the defense programs at the Department of Energy—he was the man responsible for America's nuclear bombs. "We were all insiders—not the kind of guys who'd run off at the mouth in public," he said, in explaining why his panel members did not speak out on the issue at the time. "We had no doubt it was a bomb," Kerr said, adding that in his opinion the Ruina panel's mandate was driven by politics: "to find a different explanation." 

One mystery is why the Ruina panel scientists, all honorable men, would place themselves in a position where others could limit what information they could evaluate. The panel members had been assured that they would be given all of the relevant intelligence about the satellite, and yet one of the most important discoveries—uncovered by Ruina himself and known to the White House—was not made available to them. 

Ruina was a director of MIT's Defense and Arms Control Studies Program and, as such, was involved in late 1979 in the preparation of a federally funded MIT report that assessed the foreign availability of critical components for the assembly of short-range ballistic missiles and compared those components with those manufactured in the United States. One of Ruina's three colleagues in preparing the report was an Israeli post graduate student. Shortly after Ruina's involvement on the vela sighting became known at MIT, the Israeli, who said he had worked on the Israeli nuclear missile systems, began talking to Ruina about Israel's nuclear capability. "I had the feeling he [the Israeli] knew an enormous amount," recalled George Rathjens, the former Carter administration nonproliferation official who was Ruina's close colleague at MIT. "He knew about missiles and he knew about guidance systems, and he talked freely about anything. It was almost as if he had an ordinary kind of job." Ruina, appropriately, forwarded the Israeli's information in a written report to Spurgeon Keeny at ACDA. "Some people in the intelligence community thought he was telling it like it was," Keeny said of the Israeli's intelligence. "The message is 'We've got a huge system that's more sophisticated than you think.' The guy said it [the September 22 flash] was a joint Israeli-South African attempt." 

Keeny, confronted with the potentially explosive intelligence about what had happened and who had been involved, remained loyal to the Carter presidency and dismissed the report as nonsense. "I concluded that it was very questionable," he acknowledged. "I took it with a grain of salt." His colleagues in the White House, Keeny said, shared his view that Ruina's postgraduate student was peddling Israeli disinformation. The information was not made known to the intelligence community or to Ruina's colleagues on the panel. It stayed buried in the bureaucracy. 

There were a few government experts on nonproliferation policy who were convinced that Frank Press and Spurgeon Kenny made the right choice in seeking to mitigate the impact of a South African-Israeli nuclear test. "My belief is that the conclusion of the Ruina panel was the right conclusion for that time," one nonproliferation official said. "What do you do? Look at the issues involved—apartheid, Camp David, NPT, human rights, dealing with the Indians [on nuclear proliferation], stopping reprocessing worldwide. You would have do some thing strong, especially to Israel, but there was a large segment of the population that Carter couldn't alienate." [What do you do? For one you call out Israel,how about some damn sanctions on Israel,I can think of other options also.Looking current I have no problem with Iran getting nukes if Israel has them D.C]

The American intelligence community had done far better in its reporting on the South African test—the CIA insisted in internal estimates throughout 1979 and 1980 that there had been a test—but it basically remained in the dark about the sophistication of the Israeli nuclear program. In 1980, the Agency published another Special National Intelligence Estimate (SNIE) on Israeli capability and came up with essentially the same numbers as Carl Duckett had produced in 1974. Israel, the CIA said, had manufactured at least twenty and as many as thirty nuclear warheads. The new estimate, however, was much more comprehensive than previous studies. The CIA was able to report that the Israelis had upgraded the reactor to increase its output and also improved the reactor's cooling capacity—clear signs that a greater amount of plutonium for nuclear weapons was being generated. There was no longer any doubt, the estimate said, that Israel had completed construction of a chemical reprocessing plant—but just where and how was not known. "It was the first serious estimate," one Carter administration official said, "and it enabled the people in the field to really look out for what Israel had." Even so, the CIA report seriously underestimated the number of Israeli warheads and the sophistication of its nuclear operation. Sometimes facts were strained to keep the numbers low. The KH-11, with its brilliant photography, had captured an Israeli nuclear missile storage site and the experts at the National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC) had been able to count ten items that were subsequently confirmed as nuclear warheads. No one had ever seen an Israeli warhead before, and the intelligence community chose to take the fact that only ten warheads were seen, one official recalled, "as confirmation of our guesses. We thought the pictures were extraordinary, but decided that they didn't add anything new. It was consistent with our numbers." 

The 1980 CIA estimate had been ordered by Deputy Under Secretary of State Joseph S. Nye, Jr., who emerged as the Carter administration's key—and highly progressive—adviser on nonproliferation policy. Nye acknowledged that coping with the Israeli bomb was a low priority under Jimmy Carter. "There wasn't much that could be done," Nye said. "The Israelis had already done it. It was not something you could make a demarche [diplomatic protest] about. The question is: do you make a big hullabaloo about it?" 

The answer was no.

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Israel's Nuclear Spy