Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

Dimona’s silver dome—beneath which was the reactor—rose above the desert heat. Kirya le Mehekar Gariny, Dimona’s Hebrew name, employed over 2,500 scientists and technicians. They worked within the most fortified plant on earth. The sand around the perimeter fences was continuously checked for signs of intruders. Pilots knew that any aircraft flying within a five-mile air exclusion zone could be shot down. Engineers had bulldozed an eighty-foot-deep chamber to house the reactor, part of an underground complex known as Machon Two. At its core was the separating/reprocessing plant that had been labeled “textile machinery” when shipped from France.

By itself the reactor could not provide Israel with a nuclear bomb. To produce one required fissionable material, uranium or plutonium. The handful of nuclear powers had agreed among themselves never to provide as much as a gram of either substance to all those outside their exclusive “club.” Imposing though it was, the reactor at Dimona was little more than a showpiece until it received fissionable materials.

Three months after the reactor had been installed, a small nuclear material processing company opened for business in a converted World War II steel plant in the unappealing town of Apollo, Pennsylvania. The company was called the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation, Numec. Its chief executive was Dr. Salman Shapiro.

On LAKAM’s computer database of prominent American Jews with a scientific background, Shapiro was also listed as a prominent fund-raiser for Israel. Rafi Eitan knew he had found a potential answer to how to provide the Dimona reactor with fissionable material. He ordered a full check made into the background of Shapiro and every member of the plant staff. The investigation was entrusted to the katsa in Washington.

The inquiry launched, Rafi Eitan continued to immerse himself in a story that had switched from the desert heat of Dimona to the cool corridors of the White House.

Among the data the Washington katsa had sent was a copy of a memo written on February 20, 1962, by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission to Shapiro, bluntly warning that the company’s “failure to comply with security regulations may be punishable as provided by law, including the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 and by the espionage laws.”

The threat increased Rafi Eitan’s feeling he may have found a way into the U.S. nuclear industry. Numec appeared to be a company not only with poor security, but also lax bookkeeping and a management that left a great deal to be desired by America’s nuclear watchdog. Those very deficiencies made the company an attractive target.

The son of an Orthodox rabbi, Salman Shapiro’s brilliance had already carried him far. At Johns Hopkins University he had obtained his doctorate in chemistry by the age of twenty-eight. His capacity for hard work had seen him become an important member of the nuclear research and development laboratory at Westinghouse; the corporation was contracted to the United States Navy to develop submarine reactors. Checks on Shapiro’s personal background revealed some of his relatives had been Holocaust victims and Shapiro, in “his typical discreet way,” had provided several million dollars for the Technion Institute in Haifa that offered tuition in science and engineering.

In 1957 Shapiro had left Westinghouse and set up Numec. It had twenty-five stockholders, all openly sympathetic to Israel. Shapiro found himself head of a small company in an aggressive cutthroat industry. Nevertheless, Numec had won a number of contracts to recover enriched uranium, a process that usually led to the loss of a quantity of uranium during the salvage operation. There was no way of telling how great or when the loss had taken place. The revelation made Rafi Eitan pop his vitamins with even more satisfaction.

He continued to read how the already uneasy relationship between Israel and the United States over the desire of the Jewish state to become a nuclear power increased when Ben-Gurion traveled to Washington in 1960. At a series of meetings with State Department officials, he was bluntly told that for Israel to possess nuclear weapons would affect the balance of power in the Middle East. In February 1961, President John F. Kennedy wrote to Ben-Gurion suggesting that Dimona should be regularly inspected by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Alarmed, Ben-Gurion flew to New York to meet with Kennedy at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. The Israeli leader was “very worried” about what he saw as “relentless American pressures.” But Kennedy was firm: there had to be an inspection. Ben-Gurion gave in with what little grace he could muster. He returned home convinced “a Catholic in the White House is bad news for Israel.” The prime minister turned to the one man in Washington he could trust, Abraham Feinberg, a Zionist supporter of Israel’s nuclear aspirations.

At one level, the native New Yorker was the most important Jewish fund-raiser for the Democratic Party. Feinberg made no secret of why he had raised many millions: every dollar was to ensure the party backed Israel in Congress. He had also discreetly provided many more additional millions of dollars to create Dimona. The money came in cashier’s checks to the Bank of Israel in Tel Aviv, thus avoiding the accountability of the Israeli foreign exchange controls. Ben-Gurion told Feinberg to “sort out the boy. Make the putz understand the reality of life.”

Feinberg’s method was straightforward political pressure—the kind that had already infuriated Kennedy when he was running for office. Then, Feinberg had bluntly told him: “We are willing to pay your bills if you will let us have control of your Middle East policy.” Kennedy had promised to “give Israel every possible break.” Feinberg had agreed to provide an initial campaign contribution of five hundred thousand dollars—“with more to come.”

Now he used the same direct approach: if President Kennedy continued to insist on an inspection of Dimona, he should “not count on Jewish financial support in the next political election.” Powerful support came from an unexpected source. Kennedy’s secretary of state, Robert S. McNamara, told Kennedy he could “understand why Israel wants a nuclear bomb.”

Nevertheless, Kennedy was resolute and Israel was forced to accept an inspection. The president did at the last minute grant two concessions. In return for access to Dimona, the United States would sell Israel Hawk surface-to-air missiles, then the most advanced defensive weapon in the world. And the inspection need not be carried out by the International Atomic Energy Agency, but by an American-only team—that would have to schedule its visit weeks in advance.

Rafi Eitan relished the detailed account of how the Israelis had duped the American inspectors.

A bogus control center was built over the real one at Dimona, complete with fake control panels and computer-lined gauges that gave a credible impression of measuring the output of a reactor engaged in an irrigation scheme to turn the Negev into lush pastureland. The area containing the “heavy” water smuggled from France and Norway was placed off-limits to the inspectors “for safety reasons.” The sheer volume of heavy water would have been proof the reactor was being readied for a very different purpose.

When the Americans arrived, the Israelis were relieved to discover not one spoke Hebrew. It further lessened any possibility of the inspectors uncovering the true intention for Dimona.

The stage was set for Rafi Eitan.

Gaining access to the Numec plant was relatively easy. Israel’s embassy in Washington requested permission from the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission “for a team of our scientists to visit the facility to better understand the concerns expressed by your inspectors on the reprocessing of nuclear waste.” The request was granted, even though the FBI was now running a full-scale surveillance operation to discover whether Shapiro had been recruited as an Israeli spy.