Stealing the Atom Bomb: How Denial and Deception Armed Israel Read online

  STEALING THE ATOM BOMB

  HOW DENIAL AND DECEPTION ARMED ISRAEL

  Roger J. Mattson

  Copyright @ 2016 by Roger J. Mattson

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Roger J. Mattson, [email protected].

  Second edition

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  Print ISBN: 978-1515083917

  The document on the front cover is from FBI files.

  The FBI redacted it before release.

  It contains the names of the four Israeli spies who visited NUMEC on September 10, 1968,

  What Readers Said About Stealing the Atom Bomb

  “Mattson was known at NRC for his direct manner and willingness to voice unvarnished opinions. He has done it again in this very interesting book—the research is most impressive.” J. Samuel Walker, former historian of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and author of Three Mile Island: A Nuclear Crisis in Historical Perspective.

  “As the possible spread of nuclear weapons continues to trouble the Middle East, this extensively documented book is a timely reminder that nuclear proliferation began there, in Israel, in the 1960s. Mattson’s meticulous research spotlights the core question for Americans: why, in 2016, are U.S. intelligence agencies still trying to hide how Israel obtained U.S. Navy uranium to make its first bombs?” Margaret Ryan, former editor (1986-2008) of Nucleonics Week.

  “What a painstaking book! It needed to be done and Mattson hit the right reason, which is the moral one. This is a mighty work about tragic legal and political failings that will inform curious people for generations.” John Fialka, former reporter on intelligence, military and energy for the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Star.

  “This book is painstakingly researched and gracefully written. I am floored, really, at its portrait of my father; I can almost feel his ironic gratitude to the author. I see here the careful balance my father maintained, reckless forces all around, guided by his own principles.” John Hadden, playwright, director, actor, teacher and author of Conversations with a Masked Man: My Father, the CIA, and Me.

  “Stealing the Atom Bomb is the definitive book about how and why a team of spies and their American associate diverted U.S. weapons-grade uranium into the Israeli nuclear weapons program—and why the American government never did anything about it.” Grant F. Smith, director of the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy and author of Divert!

  “No one has done a more thorough analysis of the disappearance of bomb-grade uranium from a U.S. plant in the 1960s, and the evidence points to an Israeli operation.” Victor Gilinsky, former Commissioner of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

  “This is the most authoritative account of the 1960s diversion from the United States of highly enriched uranium that was used to accelerate Israel’s nuclear weapons program. In meticulous detail, citing hundreds of internal U.S. government documents, Mattson exposes the lies of senior U.S. and Israeli government officials in their efforts to cover up the diversion and protect the perpetrators; and he reveals how the CIA continues to needlessly classify 40 to 50 year old documents that could give U.S. citizens and federal authorities a full accounting of this shameful blotch on our government’s conduct.” Thomas B. Cochran, Ph.D.

  “This is a well written, important book. How did Israel become a nuclear weapons state and what roles, if any, did U.S. government agencies and political leaders play? Mattson’s book provides a major resource to those seeking answers to these questions.” William Dircks, former Executive Director for Operations, Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

  Table of Contents

  Preface

  Part One: Prelude to Nuclear Espionage

  1. CIA, FBI and AEC: from 1945 to 1965

  2. Israel’s Nuclear Genesis

  3. The Apollo Uranium Plant (1957-1965)

  Part Two: Missing, Not Lost

  4. Where Oh Where (1965)

  5. Secret Investigation (1965)

  6. Ambiguous Membership (1967)

  7. Desert near Dimona (1968)

  Part Three: The Genie, the Bottle and the Brain Drain

  8. Visitation (1968)

  9. Divided Loyalty (1969)

  10. Quixotic Quest (1970)

  Part Four: Need to Know

  11. Reprise (1976)

  12. Conran the Whistleblower (1977)

  13. Emergent Theories (1978)

  14. CIA Hydra (1979)

  15. Wrap-up (1979-1980)

  Part Five: Whodunit

  16. Shapiro’s Recollections

  17. Alternative Hypotheses

  18. Apollo Sunset

  19. Toward a Deeper Understanding

  Acronyms

  About the Author

  Bibliography

  Endnotes

  Acknowledgements

  Writing this book required help. Primary among the helpers were Dr. Victor Gilinsky and the late Dr. Henry Myers who followed much of the same trail as I in the 1970s, and then helped to sort out the facts and commented on drafts en route to this final product. Grant Smith aided my work by commenting on drafts, persisting in appeals of the many document denials by CIA and FBI and researching the life of David Lowenthal, the origins of Apollo Industries and the reach of the Israel Lobby. The archivists and FOIA specialists at various libraries and government agencies were professional and helpful. Thanks also to friends and family who read drafts of the manuscript and made helpful comments. At the top of the list of contributors is Donna Mattson who was there from the investigations in the 1970s to the writing of this book, not just to encourage, empathize and edit, but also to help recall the facts of the case and the people of the AEC in the 1960s.

  Previous accounts of the NUMEC affair include the book Divert by Grant F. Smith, an investigative reporter and author who heads the Institute for Research: Middle East Policy. Victor Gilinsky and I wrote two articles that were published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to describe the likely fate and the coverup of the missing uranium at Apollo. The reports of journalists David Burnham of the New York Times and John Fialka of the Washington Star tracked the story as it first unfolded in the public domain in the late 1970s. This account draws upon those earlier efforts, which are acknowledged with gratitude.

  Much is owed to the reviewers of the manuscript for their wisdom and the course corrections they suggested. They included David Burnham, Thomas Cochran, Avner Cohen, William Dircks, John Fialka, Victor Gilinsky, John Hadden, Jack Newman, Margaret Ryan, Samuel Walker and Leonard Weiss. A special thanks to J. B. Rivard for the suggestions I heeded and the ones I did not.

  The photos and graphics are in the public domain.

  Mistakes that remain are mine.

  Preface

  In March 1976, General Brent Scowcroft, National Security Advisor to President Gerald Ford, hastily convened a meeting of the National Security Council staff. Scowcroft called the meeting to address the concern of Commissioner Marcus Rowden of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) that some younger members of the NRC staff were about to “spill the beans” about an American company called NUMEC. Rowden’s alarm stemmed from a briefing of NRC officials by a high-ranking official of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) that occurred just days before. The CIA official told NRC for the first time of CIA’s conclusion of nearly a decade before that NUMEC was the source of highly en
riched uranium that aided startup of Israel’s nuclear weapons program.

  The NRC people were stunned to learn of CIA’s conclusion, not least because NUMEC was one of their licensees. More importantly, the new information from CIA confirmed what a senior NRC staff member, James Conran, had been trying to tell his managers for months. He had stumbled on similar information about NUMEC in the files of the former Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). The Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA) inherited those files when AEC was abolished in 1975. The ERDA people were determined to keep the NUMEC files away from the NRC, which had also spun off from the old AEC. Because his NRC managers did not heed his concerns, Conran was about to go public and blow the whistle that his work was being impeded by an inappropriate claim that he had no “need to know.” Rowden asked for the NSC meeting to discuss how to contain the spread of what he secretly knew to be damning information about the relationship among NUMEC, America’s nuclear program and Israel’s nuclear program. The meeting led to nearly forty more years of official denial and obfuscation of the NUMEC affair, a situation that continues to this day.

  The account presented in this book is the product of a perennial preoccupation with the NUMEC affair. My first knowledge of it dawned in April 1977 with an early morning phone call from Rowden, by then the Chairman of the NRC. He sent me on a short-term mission that grew to occupy my private thoughts, haunt too many sleepless nights and guide my persistent inquiry for nearly 40 years. Although I am an advocate of nuclear power, believing it to be an essential ingredient of our deliverance from the death-dealing grip of fossil fuels, it is time for this affair to become more widely known.

  My journey on the path to embracing the CIA’s conclusion about NUMEC started innocently enough: Rowden wanted me to lead a team of NRC security experts to respond to charges made by our whistle-blowing colleague, James Conran. As a senior staff member in the safeguards organization of the NRC, Jim and his colleagues were then and are now the people that ensure commercial nuclear facilities, materials, and know-how don’t fall into the wrong hands. Just two days before Rowden’s call, on April 4, 1977, Conran sent open letters to the NRC, President Jimmy Carter and Representative Morris Udall (D-AZ), the head of NRC’s oversight committee in the U.S. House of Representatives. Conran claimed, among other things, that highly enriched uranium, a material used in making nuclear weapons, had gone missing from the Apollo Plant of the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (NUMEC). He said suspicious circumstances surrounded the disappearance of the material more than a decade earlier when it was regulated by the AEC. He also claimed that intelligence agencies had hidden the facts from him, the recently created NRC and the public.

  Over the next few weeks, my five-man team of NRC experts learned that Conran was correct in many of his allegations, including the possibility that the missing uranium was diverted to Israel. Years later, as evidence continued to mount, it became clear that responsibility for covering up the possibility of such a diversion, if not for the act itself, extended to the highest offices in the nation. As a result, our government failed to prosecute its citizens who aided a foreign nation in acquiring nuclear weapons. Our government failed in this responsibility at the same time it was advocating implementation of the international Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) to stave off such possibilities.

  While that fact is shocking, it is not the whole story. Our government has failed for reasons of political expedience and ineptitude to stop the spread of nuclear weapons on other occasions. India, Pakistan and North Korea lead that list. By failing to adequately support the cause of nonproliferation, our government has knowingly aided, abetted or abided the acquisition of nuclear weapons by politically unstable countries and unsavory regimes with which it sought to curry favor. Our leaders not only covered up these nuclear misdeeds, they also failed to make meaningful progress toward nuclear disarmament as America promised to do when it signed the NPT more than forty years ago.

  The theft of uranium from Apollo in the 1960s heralded the advent of a large and growing threat that transcends the nuclear madness of the Cold War. That threat is the spread of nuclear weapons to unstable states and thence to subnational terror groups. To help get our nation more firmly on course toward nuclear disarmament, where its opinions count in the international debate, it is time for our government to admit fully its knowledge of and involvement in the NUMEC affair. To help create the will for such atonement, I have written this account to tell what I learned by peering through veils woven by others to hide the truth.

  Here is the story in simple terms. Beginning more than 50 years ago, and extending over the period from 1957 to 1978, according to official U.S. government records and studies, more than 300 kilograms of uranium 235 (U-235) in the form of highly enriched uranium (HEU) went missing from a nuclear fuel manufacturing plant in the tiny town of Apollo, Pennsylvania. Some of the missing material could be accounted for by normal losses, but some could not. It now seems clear that early in that period, foreign agents, perhaps aided by American citizens, diverted a significant fraction of the missing uranium to Israel to jump-start its fledgling nuclear-weapons program. Because of the enormously high stakes involved in the public becoming aware of the illicit transfer of this basic ingredient of nuclear weapons to a foreign country, the affair has been clouded in denial and deception for 50 years.

  NUMEC owned the Apollo uranium plant. A celebrated Zionist, David Lowenthal, financed the startup of the company in 1957. In the late 1940s, Lowenthal was associated with organizations that helped to establish the state of Israel. One of his partners in the NUMEC startup was Dr. Zalman Mordecai Shapiro, a leading American metallurgist and another dedicated Zionist. Dr. Shapiro designed, built and oversaw operation of the Apollo plant until the early 1970s. The plant began manufacturing fuel for nuclear reactors in 1959. It processed many tons of uranium in its lifetime, reaching a peak annual throughput of more than 700 metric tons in 1973.

  In early 1965, the AEC’s Oak Ridge Operations Office in Tennessee conducted a routine inventory of government-owned HEU that had been leased to NUMEC. As the Oak Ridge people suspected, based on past concerns, the inventory disclosed a significant shortage. In early 1966, after extensive investigations, and accounting for all conceivable operating losses, the AEC confirmed that 178 kilograms of U-235 were missing from the Apollo uranium plant. The missing uranium was in the form of HEU, the main ingredient for uranium-fueled atom bombs. Within three years, the amount of missing U-235 in the form of HEU grew to 269 kilograms.

  Although the AEC, its successor agency the NRC, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Justice Department, the CIA, the Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, the General Accounting Office, the National Security Council, the Defense Intelligence Agency, two committees of the U.S. House of Representatives and four presidential administrations purported to investigate what became of the missing uranium, they never found or recovered it. The investigations extended over the period from 1965 to the early 1980s. The investigators all acknowledged that the material might have made its way to Israel, and some in high position were certain it went there, but, until recently, hard evidence of a diversion was veiled in secrecy and hard to find.

  Today, more is known about the NUMEC affair than ever before. The FBI has released an account of a detailed statement in 1980 by a former NUMEC employee who said he encountered armed strangers on the uranium plant’s loading dock one night in early 1965. He said they were loading what appeared to be canisters of HEU onto a truck in racks that he had not been seen before and were heading to a ship bound for Israel. He said that a NUMEC manager later threatened him to keep his mouth shut, or else. In addition, the CIA recently released documents that appear to corroborate the claim that it found HEU from the United States in 1968 near the Israeli nuclear weapons manufacturing site at Dimona. Furthermore, a trove of documents in the estate of John Hadden, former CIA station chief in Tel Aviv, provides insights to
what CIA knew about NUMEC in the mid to late 1960s. Finally, it is now clear that Zalman Shapiro, throughout the time he headed NUMEC, collaborated with a number of Israeli intelligence agents dedicated to the acquisition of nuclear secrets from the United States.

  As the leader of the NRC team that investigated Conran’s allegations, I have taken a keen interest in the tortuous trails left by the various investigations of NUMEC, from the 1960s to the 1980s, as their results slowly emerged from official secrecy. This account draws on declassified documents from the U.S. government and the insights of historians, former government officials and investigative journalists. It presents more information about the diversion of secrets and materials to Israel from NUMEC than anything previously written on the subject.

  Because it has happened in numerous cases and has gone unacknowledged, the clandestine transfer of sensitive nuclear expertise and materials to surreptitious nuclear weapons programs can happen again. Furthermore, although this account is limited to the facts surrounding NUMEC, other nations have carried out nuclear espionage, including China, India, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Pakistan and Syria. The likelihood of nuclear espionage in the future begs for reinforcement of U.S. policy on nuclear nonproliferation to thwart the efforts of nations and organizations that seek nuclear weapons.

  As this account unfolds, it will become clear that there are general lessons to be learned from the NUMEC affair, including the difficulty of dealing with dual national allegiances in controlling nuclear proliferation, the burden imposed on the United States by the outworn Israeli policy of nuclear opacity and the unjustified use of official secrecy to block citizens from meaningful assessment of their government’s actions.

  This book is arranged generally in chronological order, with an occasional leap forward to see the consequences of significant events. The first chapter summarizes the early years of three government agencies that figured in the NUMEC affair, that is, the FBI, the CIA and the AEC. The second chapter summarizes the origins and early accomplishments of the Israeli nuclear weapons program. With this background, the narrative turns to the late 1950s, when Zalman Shapiro incorporated NUMEC, and then traces the years in which HEU went missing from NUMEC’s Apollo plant. The account continues through the administrations of four U.S. presidents that investigated the affair while perpetuating the government’s secrecy and concludes with a summary of alternative views on what happened and who did it. The saga is at times difficult to follow because of the protracted and at times random declassification and release of documents. Thus, it was not unusual for information to emerge about an event a decade or more after it occurred. To aid with that complexity, frequent dates are provided to guide readers through the maze.