Did US sell nuclear weapons via Israel?

[outsider]

This has to be taken cautiously, the Russian has not been identified by name, nor any of the 'voluminous documentary proof' alluded to; but apart from nukes being used in London, it does all fit together...
And maybe the Russians have totally lost any faith they had in Western promises and intentions, after Libya, Syria and now Ukraine, that they are letting SERIOUS cats out of the bag in order to stir up the American people:


US secretly selling nukes worldwide via Israel:
http://www.presstv.com/detail/2014/05/22/363676/us-secretly-selling-nu kes-worldwide/

'In 2008, Houston police pulled over CIA agent Roland Carnaby on what appeared to be a routine traffic stop. A few seconds later, Carnaby was dead.

It is illegal to detain a CIA agent under any circumstances. They may carry any weapon, anywhere, anytime, and request assistance from any law enforcement official with more than certainty.

Why then would this incident be part of a highly classified Russian intelligence report? Could it, perhaps, be that Carnaby, answering directly to former President and CIA Director, George H.W. Bush, was murdered to silence his participation in the theft and sale of American nuclear warheads?

Carnaby was holding a trove of documents outlining the theft and transfer of hundreds of nuclear warheads from the Pantex Plant near Amarillo, Texas. Weapons sent there for disassembly were transshipped to Israel and, from there, refurbished, their cores remachined and then sold around the world or stored in Israeli embassies and consulates around the world.

The Russian report outlines a very different view of the past 30 years, a “view” that “fits like a glove.”

DIMONA OUT OF ACTION
The report not only confirms Israel’s nuclear weapon inventory but outlines the program of subterfuge and piracy required to keep Israel as a nuclear power after their facility at Dimona suffered a critical “event” in 1988.

“Dimona is a standard 75-megawatt thermal open top reactor as used in France for their plutonium weapons production program, their version of Stanford (Editor's note: Probably "Hanford").
Due to overuse as a fast breeder reactor by the Israelis, Dimona suffered a "steam explosion" IE a flash over indecent due to neutron criticality back in the late 1980's under Bush 1. This shut down its operation for many years until repairs could be made.
It know only operates at very low power levels due to neutron absorption damage to the containment vessel. Now mainly use for isotope production. This forced the Israelis to turn to stolen nuclear stockpiles from the US for the continuation of their nuclear program.”

The highly classified Russian report, released, experts believe, to demonstrate American hypocrisy over recent events in the Ukraine, is a litany of horror stories. If this is a “first shot over the bow” by Russian intelligence, American officials can only dread what may be to come.

BACKGROUND
48 hours ago, the retired chief of Russia’s counter-intelligence effort for the Middle East released a highly classified report designed to embarrass the United States and demonstrate their servitude to Israel and complicity in broad acts of nuclear proliferation.

The report, loaded with “shock value” intelligence and backed by reams of supporting documents including classified nuclear weapons plans demonstrated that Russia has been able to maintain a high level of penetration of not just American nuclear weapons labs but security agencies as well.

ROUND ONE, 9/11
The report, carefully structured for maximum shock value, begins with 9/11, the watershed event of our era:

“The type of nuclear devices used on 911 were a modified version of the W-54 nuclear artillery shells that were covertly provided to the Israelis between 1988 and 1998 from US surplus stockpiles illegally exported during the Bush/Clinton era.
Chemical analysis done by DOE Sandi was able to identify the chemical/radiation footprint or fingerprint of the warheads based on samples taken after 911 of the fallout at ground zero.”

According to the report, 911 was an Israeli operation facilitated by blackmail of Bush 41 and 43, threatening them with “outing” for their personal financial involvement in the sale of 350 primarily w54 nuclear artillery rounds, sold through Israel but distributed to a number of nations.

The Russian report further outlines that NATO partners, particularly Britain and France, were involved every step of the way. 911 was cover for stolen gold, stock fraud and the looting of the American economy. The “wars for profit” were the Bush boys cashing in on their own.

THE “HOW” OF 911
A number of theories have been introduced to explain the mysterious effects seen at ground zero on 9/11. In an article on the Press TV website, evidence of a widespread cover-up of an epidemic of radiation exposure-related cancers tied to 9/11, was presented.

Not only has Russia confirmed the Press TV findings, they present evidence of nuclear weapons use, evidence from a suppressed report based on findings by the Department of Energy’s Sandia Laboratories.

“Only a 2 kiloton device was needed to drop the buildings. A 2 kiloton device will produce a fireball of apx 150 to 200 feet in diameter at over 4000 degrees Centigrade. Just large enough to melt the I beams of the central core of the building and drop them in place. The light flash would last less than 1 second and primarily be in the UV light range. Overpressure would only be at 60PSI max and directed upwards with the blast.
Fallout would be minimal and located to within ground zero range only. Radiation would drop to acceptable levels within 72 hrs. after the blast. Most fall out was trapped in the cement dust thus causing all of the recent cancer deaths that we are now seeing in NYC amongst first responders.”

The report continues with details that close the door on speculation about 9/11, putting an end to conspiracy theories and, in particular, the wildest one of all, the pseudo-science fairy tale broadly rejected by the 9/11 Commission but allowed to stand as America descended into an Islamophobic frenzy.

“Fallout would be minimal and located to within ground zero range only. Radiation would drop to acceptable levels within 72 hrs. after the blast. Most fall out was trapped in the cement dust thus causing all of the recent cancer deaths that we are now seeing in NYC amongst first responders.
Melted steel and iron oxide or "nano thermite" is a byproduct of the very high gamma ray / Neutron flux induced into the central steel core. The radiation dissolves the steel into iron oxide consuming the carbon and silicone in the steel.”

This explains the missing steel columns and the very important clue of the "vaporized” 20 ton antenna tower atop the south tower. The upward blast of radiation literally vaporized it. Video evidence proves this to be true.

The total (redacted) data file from DOE Sandia on the 911 event is well over 72 MB. “P.S. Snowden didn’t have a Q clearance so he missed this one.”

The scope of the Bush/Cheney/Israeli nuclear proliferation operation, according to the report, is well beyond anything imagined. Here, Russia places the blame, naming not only Vice President Dick Cheney and former White House Chief of Staff Ram Emanuel but Tom Countryman, tasked, according to Russian sources, with actually managing the program that spread nuclear weapons to Brazil, North and South Korea, Saudi Arabia and a number of other nations.

“Illegal distribution of US nuclear material to foreign allies was not limited to Israel. Virtually all NATO allies were in on this scam too. Dick Cheney was the bad guy on this one. Bush2/Cheney traded nuclear pits to foreign country as IOU’s in order to get what they wanted. Tom Countryman a well-known Israeli operative is curiously now in charge of N.N.P. at the State Department under Obama. He was put there by Ram Emanuel.”

REACTIVATING “DEAD NUKES”
Only nuclear weapons that had deteriorated but could be recommissioned were of use to Israel. The Russian report outlines the basis for selecting the W-54 warhead and exacting details on how weapons were created out of America’s “nuclear scrap heap.”

“A total of over 350 pits were transferred to the Israelis over a 10 to 20 year period of time. The W-54 type of pit design were the most desirable due to the 2 point implosion pit design. This is the easiest to re manufacture and modify as compared to other circular pit designs.
The pill shaped design of the W-54 type weapon contains over 1.5 times more plutonium than a standard pit. This would allow enough Plutonium to be recovered that was still of weapons grade use even after 32 plus years of age. Americium build up in the pit over time eventually makes the Pit unusable as a weapon so they have a limited shelf life based on how fast or slow the Plutonium was produce in the reactor at Stanford.
Usually it was about 150 days max. Irradiation time in the reactor during production determines the shelf life of the pit as weapons grade material. All of the micro nukes used by the Israelis are re-manufactured W-54 type series devices.”

CONCLUSION
According to the Russian report, Israel used remanufactured W-54 warheads, reconfigured as micro-nukes, for terror bombings in Bali, London and to destroy the Fukashima nuclear reaction site in Japan.

With weapons around the world, stored in embassies and consulates, and their powerful friends in the American “right,” Israel has managed to maintain nuclear superpower status without a real production facility, using only pirates and traitors, something America, according to our Russian sources, seems to have no shortage of.

NN

(Looks like it is from Gordon Duff, which does ring some alarm bells, but I have read from another very credible source that Bush Sr. allowed the sale of extremely hi-tech weapons to Russia and China for profit).

[outsider]

Seems the guy was shot in mysterious circumstances:

Could officers have saved suspect's life?:
http://abc13.com/archive/6113992/

'..April 30, 2008 9:24:09 PM PDT

By Andy Cerota



HOUSTON --
Houston police are still trying to figure out whether officers were justified in killing a man yesterday following a high speed chase. Police pulled over Roland Carnaby, 52, for speeding. During that stop, he presented them with credentials claiming to work for the CIA. The officers at the scene couldn't verify those documents before Carnaby sped off. Several minutes later, Carnaby was shot near the West Loop.

Officers say they saw him reach for something shiny, which turned out to be a cell phone. Police eventually found two pistols and a shotgun in Carnaby's vehicle.

They're not sure why he was claiming to be a federal agent.

"He called me back and said there was no record of him being an employee of the FBI or CIA," said Houston Police Chief Harold Hurtt.

We've been told by the CIA Office of Public Affiars, "While we do not as a rule publicly deny or confirm employment, I will tell you in this case that Mr. Carnaby was not an employee of the Central Intelligence Agency. He was never a CIA officer."

Several crucial minutes passed in the moments after Carnaby was shot by police. During those minutes, officers were not giving him medical attention despite the fact that officers are given first aid training. We asked HPD's chief about its policy.

Carnaby, who had been shot twice, was handcuffed and face down on the pavement after the chase ended. While the responding officers have CPR and first aid training, Carnaby didn't receive any type of medical treatment until the ambulance arrived nearly 12 minutes later..'

[outsider]

US Nuclear Weapons Unaccountable: Israel Behind The Crime:
https://wikispooks.com/iframeDocs/USNuclearWeaponsUnaccountable-Israel  /

'US Nuclear Weapons Unaccountable: Israel Behind The Crime:

Israel's nuclear smuggling network was key element in Carnaby murder in Houston

Israel, working with deeply-embedded intelligence moles in the United States, including within the U.S. government and "off-the-books" intelligence front companies, has been pilfering spent U.S. nuclear fuel from American nuclear arms caches at a phenomenal rate over the last several years. U.S. and foreign intelligence sources have confirmed that much of the nuclear fuel has been shipped to Israel and other locations via the port of Houston.

The illegal smuggling of spent highly-enriched uranium (HEU) and plutonium fuel from U.S. nuclear weapons facilities is the same outbound Houston shipping pipeline used by Bush-influenced Carlyle Group and the firm's front companies in Spain and France to ship precursor nerve gas chemicals to Saddam Hussein's Iraq in the 1980s, according to one Pentagon intelligence source.



The nuclear smuggling is a major back story to a September 8 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report titled "Nuclear Nonproliferation: U.S. Agencies Have Limited Ability to Account for, Monitor, and Evaluate the Security of U.S. Nuclear Material Overseas." The most serious finding in the GAO report states:

"DOE [Department of Energy], NRC [Nuclear Regulatory Commission], and State are not able to fully account for U.S. nuclear material overseas that is subject to nuclear cooperation agreement terms because the agreements do not stipulate systematic reporting of such information, and there is no U.S. policy to pursue or obtain such information. U.S. nuclear cooperation agreements generally require that partners report inventory information upon request, however, DOE and NRC have not systematically sought such data. DOE and NRC do not have a comprehensive, detailed, current inventory of U.S. nuclear material–including weapon-usable material such as highly enriched uranium (HEU) and separated plutonium–overseas that includes the country, facility, and quantity of material. In addition, NRC and DOE could not fully account for the current location and disposition of U.S. HEU overseas in response to a 1992 congressional mandate. U.S. agencies, in a 1993 report produced in response to the mandate, were able to verify the location of 1,160 kilograms out of 17,500 kilograms of U.S. HEU estimated to have been exported. DOE, NRC, and State have established annual inventory reconciliations with five U.S. partners, but not the others it has transferred material to or trades with."

The report also states that a nuclear cooperation agreement between the United States and Israel was allowed to lapse. The GAO report also states: "DOE's Global Threat Reduction Initiative (GTRI) removes U.S. nuclear material from vulnerable facilities overseas but can only bring back materials that have an approved disposition pathway and meet the program's eligibility criteria." WMR has been informed that because of the amount of HEU and plutonium smuggled from the United States outside of "approved disposition pathways," there is no way for the United States to know exactly where HEU and plutonium has been distributed, especially to unauthorized end-users who have been using the spent nuclear material in violation of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT) or U.S. export control laws. Countries that fall into this category, according to our sources, include Japan, Israel, South Korea, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, India, Syria, Iran, Burma, Egypt, Turkey, Taiwan, and Pakistan.

The major reason behind the nuclear material smuggling from the United States stems from Israel quietly re-establishing its global nuclear smuggling operations, rampant during the 1960s when it was working to acquire nuclear weapons. Israel's Dimona nuclear reactor capabilities have always been clouded in maximum secrecy but it is known that the facility suffered a major equipment failure in the 1990s that impacted on Israel's ability to re-process nuclear fuel. The diminished capabilities of the Negev Nuclear Research Center prompted Israel, in the 1990s, to actively smuggle nuclear materials, including enriched plutonium, to Israel. The smuggling operations immediately became known to the CIA's Counterproliferation Division and its non-official cover (NOC) Brewster Jennings & Associates operation headed up by Valerie Plame Wilson's. It was a major reason why Vice President Dick Cheney, his counsel Scooter Libby, State Department Undersecretary for Political Affairs (and President Obama's current envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan) Marc Grossman, and others within the Bush administration exposed the Brewster Jennings operations.

Israel's search for replacement enriched plutonium hit pay-dirt when its intelligence service discovered that the Pantex nuclear facility near Amarillo, Texas, stores enriched plutonium fuel that is 99 percent pure plutonium that does not require reprocessing for another 60 to 90 years.Israel gained access to the classified details of the Pantex operation by tapping into classified government communication networks through the Israeli-owned communication company AMDOCS.

The Israelis discovered that only U.S. nuclear cores composed of plutonium alloys were ripe for theft at Pantex. The 99 percent plutonium fuel was more well-guarded. However, the older plutonium alloy cores were unstable and the shipment of the cores through the port of Houston required refrigerated containers to keep them cooler than 150 degrees.The Israelis used refrigeration trucks to move the cores through the port of Houston from Amarillo and into refrigeration containers loaded on board ships belonging to Zim-American Israeli Shipping Company, a firm with close links to the Mossad. The plutonium cores were shipped to Israel and Dimona.

One individual who had the port of Houston under close scrutiny was CIA contractor/informant/source Roland "Tony" Carnaby. Carnaby had set up a number of video surveillance cameras at the port of Houston and routinely uploaded the stored videos from the camera units to his Macintosh computer. WMR has learned from intelligence sources that Carnaby possessed a major secret about the smuggling operation: much of the nuclear material being shipped through Houston by Israel, more than its needs, was being re-sold by Israel on the international black market. On April 29, 2008, Carnaby was shot to death by two Houston police officers after what was reported to have been a high-speed chase by police. After he was killed, the Houston police took possession of Carnaby's Macintosh computer. WMR previously reported that Carnaby kept Israeli intelligence assets and agents under close scrutiny in Houston and that he had a strange encounter with an Israeli Consulate General official the evening before he was shot. WMR also previously reported on Mossad's penetration of the Houston Police Department and the Harris County Sheriff's Office. Radiation detectors routinely scan containers at Houston for the presence of nuclear materials, hence, it was important for the Mossad to counteract Carnaby's security systems at the port.

It is known that Carnaby used a number of cell phones to dial into port video cameras to turn them on, stop them, and download captured video data. However, an Israeli firm, Orsus, was scheduled to begin installation of its own surveillance at the port, putting Carnaby's surveillance operations in jeopardy. The financial backers of Orsus include ComSor Venture Fund LDC, a joint operation of Comverse Technology, which includes its subsidiary Verint Systems, and Soros Fund Management's Quantum Industrial Holdings Ltd. Other investors in Orsus include Israel's Koor Industries, the leading shareholder of Tadiran, the Israeli defense electronics firm; Cial Industries and Investment, an Israeli holding company; the Cedar Fund, an 'Israeli-related' venture capital firm; Israel Infinity Venture Capital Fund; and Poalim Capital Markets, a subsidiary of Bank Hapoalim, Israel's largest bank."

Carnaby was, reportedly, working with the FBI on the Israeli nuclear smuggling issue and the FBI office in Houston requested that the Houston police call off their chase of Carnaby. It was too late for Carnaby. He was marked for assassination by Mossad and its friends in Houston area law enforcement because of his knowledge of the nuclear smuggling program. Israel was also concerned that Carnaby, a Lebanese-American with close ties to some of Lebanon's political groups opposed to Israel, might leak details of the operations to his Lebanese friends, information that would soon end up in the hands of Iranian and Syrian counter-intelligence.

One of the countries that received re-sold American plutonium fuel from Israel was Japan. However, the Japanese soon discovered that the plutonium for which they were paying the Israelis top dollar was too old and provided only short-life usable nuclear weapons. Japan decided to go it alone on their nuclear weapons development but not before they planned to blow the whistle on the Israeli and American smuggling operation to the International Atonic Energy Agency (IAEA). Before the Japanese could act, the super-quake struck Japan, along with the devastating tsunami. At that point in time, Israel and the Americans programmed their Stuxnet computer virus to trigger the nuclear catastrophe at Fukushima, the major site for Japan's nuclear weapons development program. Stuxnet, developed to disrupt Iran's nuclear program, is also effective against the nuclear power generation systems of other nations using standard supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) software, including the plutonium MOX fuel processing operations at Fukushima. Stuxnet can be used to blackmail recipients of the smuggled plutonium material, including MOX fuel, into silence. The Fukushima disaster destroyed physical evidence of the Israeli smuggling operation to Japan. However, Japanese intelligence possesses other evidence of the Israeli smuggling operations.

The recent explosion at a MOX fuel plutonium processing facility at the French Marcoule nuclear power plant was a warning to France, courtesy of Stuxnet, not to support Palestine's bid for UN membership. It is not yet clear whether the MOX being used at Marcoule was developed from the unstable and old American plutonium cores smuggled and re-sold by Israel. However, U.S. intelligence has evidence that Israel has re-sold some of its stolen plutonium material to India in return for that nation providing Israel with missile systems and related technology.

The disassociation of the CIA and FBI from Carnaby's murder in Houston was directly linked to the power of the Israel Lobby in Washington, which will stop at nothing to ensure that Israeli crimes and intelligence activities in the United States remain unexposed and unpunished.'

[TonyGosling]

How Israel Stole the Bomb
September 11, 2016
Exclusive: When Israel launched a covert scheme to steal material and secrets to build a nuclear bomb, U.S. officials looked the other way and obstructed investigations, as described in a book reviewed by James DiEugenio.
https://consortiumnews.com/2016/09/11/how-israel-stole-the-bomb/

By James DiEugenio

In 1968, CIA Director Richard Helms was presented with a disturbing National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) stating that Israel had obtained atomic weapons, a dangerous development that occurred earlier than the CIA had anticipated.

It was particularly dangerous because just the year before, the Six Day War had marked the beginning of open hostilities between the Israelis and Arab nation states. To prevail, Israel had launched preemptive air attacks against Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Iraq at the start of the conflict. Considering that violent backdrop, Helms immediately arranged a meeting with President Lyndon Johnson to inform him of this troubling milestone.


CIA Director Richard Helms.

The man who had prepared the NIE and gave it to Helms was the CIA’s chief science and technology officer, Carl Duckett. After Helms met with Johnson, the CIA Director told Duckett about the President’s rather odd reaction. LBJ did not get upset, and he did not order an investigation into how it happened. Further, he did not tell Helms to let both the Defense Department and State Department know about it so they could establish intelligence inquiries or consider sanctions.

Instead, Johnson did the opposite. He told Helms to keep the news secret and specifically told the Director not to let the secretaries of State or Defense know about it.

Helms obeyed the orders of his Commander in Chief, but he decided to talk to the FBI about how this development had occurred earlier than expected. Thus begins Roger Mattson’s Stealing the Atom Bomb: How Denial and Deception Armed Israel, the riveting story of duplicity, betrayal, cover-ups and deceit.

As the book shows, the cover-ups and duplicity did not just come from Israel and its agents in America. The deceit also came from men inside the American government who, for whatever reasons, decided to cast a blind eye on what was really happening under their jurisdiction, even after they had been alerted to it.

What Mattson reveals is no less than an atomic heist – one that could have been prevented if men in high positions had done their duty.

Highly Enriched Uranium

After Johnson told Helms not to tell State or Defense, the CIA Director called Attorney General Ramsey Clark, because what made this news even more ominous — and a potential crime — was what the CIA had discovered when it conducted a chemical test around the Israeli nuclear reactor at Dimona, in the Negev desert.


U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark with President Lyndon Johnson in 1967. (U.S. Government photo)

Duckett had concluded that Israel had something that they should not have possessed at that time: HEU, or highly enriched uranium, which could only be produced by one of the five major powers that already had nuclear weapons.

But the test had also revealed characteristics that showed the material had originated in the United States. (Mattson, p. 97) Specifically, the HEU came from Portsmouth, Ohio and then was further processed at a plant in Apollo, Pennsylvania.

The importance of this information was that the HEU was processed to such a degree – well over 90 percent U 235 – that it was classified as weapons grade uranium. The technical term for it is the acronym SNM, or Special Nuclear Material, meaning that it is fissile: it can easily be split with neutrons. Although the Portsmouth plant is shut down today, beginning in 1956 it did produce weapons-grade uranium.

It was in Apollo, Pennsylvania, that the trail of the SNM and the crime of its diversion becomes exceedingly suspect. The plant that did the further processing of HEU, and the ultimate shipping, was named Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation, or NUMEC, and there were a number of reasons why suspicion had centered on NUMEC even before Helms called Clark.

First, NUMEC had a rather unreliable record when it came to keeping track of HEU and other materials that had been given to it through the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). The way the system worked is that the particular company would forward its business requests — from either private or governmental agencies — to the AEC. The AEC would then estimate how much nuclear material NUMEC would need to fulfill the contract. If a company was using up more material than the AEC properly estimated, that company would be fined quite a lot of money. If the shortages persisted, the AEC and the FBI could then open up an investigation.

With CIA’s discoveries, the possibility presented itself that a diversion of the nuclear material could be taking place. Either someone from the outside was stealing the material, or someone on the inside was embezzling it.

As Mattson shows with charts, graphs and testimony, NUMEC had an extraordinarily bad record in this regard. The company was eventually fined over $2 million for missing materials, which, with inflation factored in, would be about $15 million today. Mattson adduces that from 1959 to 1977, about 345 kilograms of HEU went missing from NUMEC, which translates to well over 700 pounds. (ibid, p. 286)

Explaining the Deficits

In just one year, there was a loss of over 56 kilograms (or about 123 pounds). The company made up all sorts of rationales as to why this much HEU was missing, including losses during the mechanical processing. But as the author points out, there are two problems with this accounting.


President Lyndon Johnson accompanies President-elect Richard Nixon to his inauguration on Jan. 20, 1969.

First, no other plant in America reported losses of this magnitude. The AEC concluded that the losses at Apollo were more than double what they were at any other comparably sized atomic plant in the U.S. (ibid, p. 65)

Secondly, even if one chalks up some of the missing HEU to a processing loss, that still does not account for the entire record of NUMEC. Mattson figures that, even giving the company the benefit of the doubt, it still leaves about 200 pounds of missing HEU. (ibid, p. 67) That’s enough for about six atomic bombs, larger than the one used on Hiroshima.

As Mattson reports, what makes NUMEC an even more intriguing suspect is the fact that the company had some legitimate business transactions with Israel, concerning the irradiation of plants. And these legitimate packages were sent at about the time the HEU went missing. Further, the inventory records at NUMEC were extremely sloppy and some appear to have been destroyed in direct violation of the AEC code, meaning NUMEC should have been cited, but wasn’t. (ibid, p. 75)

That brings us to the founders of the NUMEC plant in Apollo, Pennsylvania, a small town of approximately 1,600 people that lies about 30 miles northeast of Pittsburgh. In 1955, the Apollo Steel Plant was purchased by David Lowenthal. Two years later, Lowenthal and Zalman Shapiro cooperated in forming NUMEC.

Shapiro, a very accomplished metallurgist who lived next door to Lowenthal, had been employed for a number of years at the nearby Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory, which supported the AEC’s Office of Naval Reactors.

In May 1958, Lowenthal merged Apollo Steel with the San Toy Mining Company in Maine. San Toy then changed its name to Apollo Industries, with the main operating officers of this new corporation Morton Chatkin, Ivan Novick and Lowenthal. (ibid, p. 43)

The board comprised these three men plus Shapiro, and later others. In the early 1960s, the steel plant’s name was changed to Raychord Steel, but with the decline of the steel industry, Raychord became a subsidiary company to Apollo.

Ties to Zionist Groups

Novick, one of Apollo’s officers, later served as national president of the Zionist Organization of America, in which Chatkin, another officer, also held a leadership role. The ZOA was a member group of the American Zionist Council, which later became the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which today is considered to be the leading lobbying group for Israel and one of the most powerful lobbying groups in Washington.


Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin

Novick also later served as a personal liaison between Ronald Reagan’s White House and the administration of Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin.

Lowenthal, who was born in Poland in 1921, came to America in 1932 and served in the American armed forces in World War II, eventually becoming a citizen in 1945. After the war, he worked with the Haganah, the Jewish paramilitary force inside Palestine, on the Zionist mission to ferry Jews into Palestine in 1947 on board the boat SS Exodus.

Since almost none of the passengers had legal immigration certificates to enter Palestine, the British Royal Navy, which ran the Palestinian Mandate, seized the ship and deported its passengers back to Europe. Lowenthal’s mission was a practical failure, but a tremendous propaganda success for the Zionist cause. The event was novelized by author Leon Uris in the number-one best-selling book Exodus, which was published in 1958 and was made into a movie two years later by director Otto Preminger, starring Paul Newman.

Lowenthal later served on board the ship Pan York, which also attempted to evade the British quarantine but was captured in Cyprus with the crew arrested, including Lowenthal. He escaped and fled to Palestine where he served with the Haganah during the war that broke out there in 1948 after the British abandoned the mandate early. (ibid, p. 44)

Lowenthal ended up serving under the legendary Meir Amit, the leading intelligence officer in Israel during the 1960s. Lowenthal was also personally acquainted with future prime ministers David Ben Gurion and Golda Meir.

Nuclear Experience

Shapiro, who had advanced degrees in chemistry and metallurgy from Johns Hopkins, worked for Westinghouse and the Navy on the nuclear reactor that powered America’s first atomic submarine, the Nautilus. Shapiro also helped develop the fuel for the first commercial nuclear reactor, the Shippingport Atomic Power Station in Pennsylvania.

Like Lowenthal, Novick and Chatkin, Shapiro also was active in supporting Israeli causes, although his activities had a slightly educational tone. He was a member of the Technion Society, which supported advances in Israeli science and technology. Indeed, he became an Honorary Life Member of the group.

He also was a Director of Hillel, an international organization that tries to acquaint Jewish students with each other on campuses and organize student trips to Israel. Like Novick and Chatkin, he was a member of the Zionist Organization of America. Many years later, it was discovered that Shapiro was on the Board of Governors of the Israeli Intelligence Center, which honors spies for Israel who clandestinely advanced the interests of the state. (Mattson, p. 84)

Beyond the individual backgrounds of these four men, there was also something else which should have attracted the U.S. intelligence community’s attention prior to Helms’s meeting with President Johnson. While running NUMEC, both men – Shapiro and Lowenthal – were taking trips to Israel and had contacts with high officials of Israeli intelligence as well as Israel’s version of the AEC.

Further, NUMEC had a guest worker, an Israeli metallurgist, in its plant, as part of an agreement NUMEC had with Israel to serve as a training consultancy which resulted in the formation of a joint company with Israel called ISORAD that initially was to deal with irradiation of citrus fruits through gamma rays. But the FBI later discovered that NUMEC also had contracts with Israel for the development of plutonium oxide as fuel elements in nuclear reactors. (Mattson, pgs. 80-81)

Since Lowenthal had so many acquaintances in high positions, he often visited Israel, including a most curious instance at about the time he purchased Apollo Steel in 1956. It was at this time that Israel was making decisions about foreign sourcing for nuclear materials and technology.

A year later, NUMEC was formed and Shapiro immediately applied for a license from the AEC to process uranium fuel in a building formerly occupied by Apollo Steel. John Hadden, CIA station chief in Tel Aviv, later noted the unusual coincidence of these events on two continents. (ibid, p. 45)

Israeli Visits

But declassified FBI files reveal that the visitations were not just one way, i.e. from Apollo, Pennsylvania, to Israel. There were also visits and meetings of Israeli officials who went to Apollo.


A photograph of a control room at Israel’s Dimona nuclear weapons plant in the 1980s. (Photograph taken by nuclear technician Mordechai Vanunu, who was later kidnapped and imprisoned by Israel as punishment for revealing its secret nuclear arsenal.)

At the time of those meetings, there were four main branches of Israeli intelligence. The Shin Bet corresponded with the Federal Bureau of Investigation; the Mossad with the Central Intelligence Agency; the Aman roughly with the Defense Intelligence Agency; and the LAKAM, which was responsible for security at Dimona and for procuring scientific and technological data from Western sources. (Mattson, p. 108)

In the mid-1960s, France started scaling back its support for the Dimona reactor, which was supposedly a research facility. With France’s pullback, LAKAM began seeking out and purchasing parts and supplies from other sources to complete the project.

LAKAM’s job included concealing the reactor’s true function – the development of a nuclear bomb – from American inspections. (ibid) During an American inspection in 1964, LAKAM even created a “Potemkin village” control room to deceive the visitors.

Unlike American intelligence, Israel also had a special operations unit that served all branches. Established in 1957, it was run by Rafi Eitan and his deputy, Avraham Bendor. (In the 1980s, Eitan became notorious for the Jonathan Pollard spy case, in which Pollard, a navy intelligence employee, was paid tens of thousands of dollars to spy for Israel in the United States with Eitan his ultimate control agent.)


Convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard in the photo from his U.S. Naval Intelligence ID.

In September 1968, the AEC told the FBI that they were giving permission to NUMEC for a visit by four Israelis, including Eitan and Bendor. However, in the application to the AEC, the occupations of the two were disguised. Eitan was said to be a chemist in the Defense Ministry; Bendor supposedly worked for the electronics division. (ibid, p. 110)

The other two men were Avraham Hermoni, who was billed as a Scientific Counselor in the Israeli Embassy in Washington, and Dr. Ephraim Biegun, described as working in the Division of Electronics for Defense. Again, this was misleading. Hermoni did, at times, work out of Washington’s Israeli Embassy, but his prime and most important function was overseeing and planning Israel’s nuclear weapons program, which he did from 1959-69. Biegun was actually head of the technical division of the Mossad from 1960-70.

CIA Suspicions

After the visit, NUMEC reported that the four men were in Apollo to buy thermo-electrical generator systems. (ibid, p. 119) Why Eitan and Bendor had to be there for that purpose is not readily apparent.

CIA officer John Hadden thought the real reason for the visit was that Shapiro was divulging top-secret technical information about plutonium manufacture – and that he was aided in this by the visiting Israeli scientist working at NUMEC. The FBI later came to agree that this was most likely the true reason for the visit. (ibid, p. 120)

Hermoni revisited Shapiro in November 1968, but the capstone to the visits to Apollo came later that month. As noted previously, France had cut back on its support for Dimona in the mid-1960s, halting the supply of uranium fuel in 1967.

In late November 1968, the Mossad arranged a covert operation called Operation Plumbat, which employed a front company in West Germany to purchase 200 tons of uranium yellowcake from Belgium. The transaction was approved by Euratom, the European organization controlling such transactions, but once the transport ship set sail for the port of Genoa, Italy, it was intercepted by another ship used by the Mossad. When the original ship reached port, the hull was empty.

The timing of this operation, on the heels of the mysterious visits by Israeli intelligence agents to Apollo, seems to constitute powerful circumstantial evidence of Israeli intentions.

Then, right after the completion of the Plumbat mission, who arrived in Israel? None other than Zalman Shapiro. The FBI discovered that in November 1968, in addition to the personal visits, Shapiro was in frequent phone contact with a number of Israeli intelligence agents, including Hermoni. (Mattson, p. 126)

A Longstanding Goal

Israel’s long trail of subterfuge and duplicity was part of a longstanding goal. As early as 1948, David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, stated that what Einstein, Teller and Oppenheimer did for America, they could easily do for Israel, since they were all Jews. In fact, he offered Einstein Israeli citizenship, which the great man declined. (ibid, p. 22) Ben-Gurion then had two meetings with Oppenheimer and numerous ones with Teller.


David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister

Ultimately, Israel settled on David Bergmann, a brilliant chemist whom Ben-Gurion appointed first chief of the Israel Atomic Energy Commission in 1952. By 1955, Bergmann was essentially running the day-to-day operations of Israel’s atomic program.

In a conversation with the American ambassador, Bergmann said the Israeli science education program was adequate in physics and chemistry but weak in engineering and non-existent in metallurgy. He also revealed that the design he had laid out for a reactor was the same as the one at Shippingport, Pennsylvania, an intriguing clue because Shapiro was a metallurgist and had worked on the Shippingport power station.

Indeed, Shapiro eventually met Bergmann and the two became close friends and colleagues, serving on the board of ISORAD, which was a joint venture of NUMEC and the IAEC. Bergmann made his first visit to America for IAEC in 1956, the year before Lowenthal turned Apollo Steel into NUMEC.

There were two significant investigations of Shapiro and NUMEC. The first was instigated by Dick Helms’s call to Ramsey Clark in 1968 and the discovery of the highly enriched uranium at Dimona. (Mattson, p. 99) The second began in 1976 when Jim Conran, a whistleblower at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, voiced complaints about the background and actions of Shapiro. Conran was a security officer and his warnings eventually got the attention of the White House. (ibid, p. 161)

During the first investigation, the FBI could not find enough evidence to justify a violation by Shapiro of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which mandates that any person in the U.S. who is representing a foreign country’s interests has to register with the Justice Department. But the FBI did recommend cancelling Shapiro’s security clearances, based on wiretaps that revealed Shapiro in close contact with Israeli intelligence officials and with members of the IAEC. (ibid, p. 138)

During these calls Shapiro reportedly said he would help Israel in any way that he could. He also expressed frustration with the new ownership at NUMEC, which had been purchased by ARCO. But his Israeli contacts said he was too valuable to leave and encouraged him to stay there. (ibid, p. 139)

FBI Surveillance

One of the most curious episodes that the FBI surveillance revealed was a meeting between Shapiro and a man named Jeruham Kafkafi, a suspected Mossad officer working under diplomatic cover. He had left Washington by air on the morning of June 20, 1969, and met Shapiro at the Pittsburgh airport for about an hour. He then left and flew back to Washington.

As a result of that surveillance, Shapiro was interviewed by the AEC in August 1969, with some of Shapiro’s answers to questions rather dubious. For instance, he said he did not know Hermoni was in charge of the Israeli nuclear development program and thought he was a university professor. Shapiro said his discussions in September and October 1968 with the Israeli officers were about water contamination, saboteur detection and military activities.

When asked why the Israelis could not have talked to the Defense Department about those topics, Shapiro had no answer. The interviewer wrote in his summary that Shapiro was cool and calm throughout except when the Kafkafi meeting was brought up. At first, Shapiro said he could not recall it, even though it happened just two months earlier. He then said he did remember it, claiming it was about an overdue invoice and a power supply resource. (p. 142)

The AEC investigators did not find the last reply credible, since it did not seem to justify an airline flight from Washington to Pittsburgh and back. Shapiro adjusted his answer by saying that there was some discussion of an investigator whom he knew from America who was going to visit Israel. He also added the figure of $32,000 as to how much Israel owed NUMEC. As Mattson notes, again, this explanation does not seem to justify an air flight and an hour-long meeting with a clandestine Mossad officer.

Closing the Inquiry

The man who ultimately decided to close this initial inquiry was Glenn Seaborg, head of the AEC. Not only did he not see any civil or criminal charges as being viable, but when President Richard Nixon’s Attorney General John Mitchell recommended revoking Shapiro’s security clearances, Seaborg balked at that also.


Glenn Seaborg, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission.

Mattson clearly sees Seaborg as being a villain in the piece. Late in the book, he explicitly accuses him of running a cover-up. (see p. 297) And, there is evidence to back up this charge. It was later discovered, during the second inquiry, that Seaborg had a close personal friendship with Shapiro. (ibid p. 268)

Earle Hightower, assistant director of safeguards at AEC, explicitly stated that the whole case regarding NUMEC was rigged because it was known that Seaborg would not take action. Little more than three years after Seaborg left the AEC, it was dissolved in 1975 and was replaced by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, in part, because critics accused the AEC of an insufficiently aggressive regulatory program.

The second, much longer, and more vigorous inquiry into NUMEC and Shapiro came about at the creation of the NRC when Jim Conran was tasked with reviewing the record of how safeguards had worked previously for the AEC so they could be strengthened in the future. In that review process, he came across the case of Shapiro and NUMEC.

When Conran asked to see more files on both, he was denied access, causing him to go up the NRC ladder to Chairman William Anders, who was briefed by, among others, Carl Duckett of the CIA. Since Anders was about to leave for a diplomatic post, he took his concerns to James Connor at President Gerald Ford’s White House.

In March 1976, the CIA’s Duckett addressed an informal gathering of pilots and astronauts, saying there was little doubt Israel had about 20 nuclear warheads. Although this was supposed to be off the record, the information leaked. In April 1976, Time reported that this claim was accurate, except the newsmagazine put the size of the arsenal at 13 bombs and added that the warheads could be delivered by Phantom jets or Jericho missiles.

Duckett wrote a memo to CIA Director George Bush in which he said he suspected that the Israeli program was jumpstarted by a diversion of enriched uranium from the NUMEC plant. (p. 165) He attached various appendices to the memo to show the results of previous inquiries into NUMEC and explain why his belief was justified.

One of the appendices consisted of a paper by John Hadden in which he expressed the suspicion that NUMEC was actually a shell company the Israeli government had set up for the express purpose of diverting materials, technology and information that Israel needed to speed up and facilitate its longstanding quest for atomic weapons. (ibid, p. 166)

A New Investigation

Attorney General Edward Levi was then sent a summary of the FBI’s previous investigation of NUMEC. Levi alerted Ford that he thought NUMEC was culpable for several crimes and, with Ford’s permission, he wished to begin a criminal inquiry. Since Ford’s close adviser James Connor was also disturbed by these findings, the President approved the investigation.

What followed was a tedious bureaucratic battle between the CIA and FBI. The FBI felt it did not have direct proof that a diversion had taken place, while the CIA had the proof — the chemical tests at Dimona — but was reluctant to reveal the intelligence to the FBI. Also, the CIA did not want to furnish the FBI with technical experts to help educate the investigating agents so they could effectively cross-examine important witnesses. Thus, the FBI’s inquiry dragged on through three presidents: Ford, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.

But even with these obstructions, the FBI did eventually find witnesses to a diversion from the Apollo plant. It turned out that the FBI did not do enough interviews of plant employees in its initial inquiry because there were at least four of them willing to talk. Those witnesses form the climax of Mattson’s book.

In 1980, one witness said that when he read newspaper accounts about the losses of enriched uranium at Apollo, he had to chuckle to himself. When asked why, he replied that in 1965 or 1966, he was walking near the loading dock at Apollo and saw people loading containers – the dimensions that were used for HEU packets – into equipment boxes. He noticed that the shipping papers for the boxes revealed that the packages were destined for Israel. This witness then suggested some other workers at the plant who had seen similar activity. (Ibid, p. 272)

Suspicion Shipment

One of these witnesses saw a flatbed truck backed up into the loading dock area with Shapiro pacing around the area while the driver was loading “stove pipes” into a cabinet on the truck. This struck the witness as odd because the plant had regularly assigned workers for loading duties during the day but this shipment was being prepared in the evening. He explained that “stove pipes” were cylindrical containers that the plant used to pack enriched uranium inside. Each stove pipe usually contained three or four packets of HEU.

When he glanced at the clipboard resting on a package, he saw the destination was Israel. The clipboard then was yanked away and an armed guard escorted him off the dock. He also said it was unusual to see Shapiro in this area of the plant, and further, that Shapiro was very seldom there at night. (ibid, p. 275)

There were two other witnesses who told the FBI about similar events. The FBI also interviewed an NRC inspector named James Devlin, who told the agents that, contrary to what Shapiro had said, the security at the Apollo plant was below par and that NUMEC did not employ a professional security force. The company had one regular armed guard and Devlin happened to know who he was, since he was also a deputy for the township. The only other guards were unarmed and non-uniformed. (ibid, pgs. 272-73)

By this time, the FBI did not want to continue the investigation, believing that nothing would come of it, although the Justice Department urged the investigators on. But the FBI was correct since, as Mattson notes more than once in his book, the last president who really wanted to stop Israel from becoming a nuclear power was John F. Kennedy. (See pgs. 38-40, p. 256)

Richard Helms’s conversation with a disinterested President Johnson underscores how that attitude changed after Kennedy’s death. As Mattson further notes, opposition to Israel’s nuclear-weapons program was more or less negated by President Richard Nixon’s meeting with Prime Minister Golda Meir in 1969 when he agreed that the U.S. would not make any public statements revealing Israel’s nuclear arsenal nor demand that it sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty, as long as Israel did no testing and made no public threats.

Even that policy was probably violated in 1979 with the Vela Incident: a suspected Israeli nuclear test done in the Indian Ocean.


Author Roger Mattson

Author Roger Mattson was part of the inquiry about the illegal transfer of atomic secrets to Israel, working in the NRC’s safeguards department when Conran first voiced his fears about a diversion at NUMEC. Thus, Mattson became part of an internal review of the Shapiro case, seeing firsthand how certain intelligence agencies were, by accident or design, obstructing the investigation.

Mattson concludes his important book by stating that this policy of casting a deliberate blind eye towards a nuclear heist by Israel places the U.S. in a compromised position when trying to enforce a policy of non-proliferation on other nations because of the obvious double standards.

To point out one paradox, the U.S. government executed Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for purportedly supplying nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union with less evidence. Plus, the tinder box of the Middle East is probably the last place where America should have allowed atomic weapons to proliferate, but it did.

Because of that, the U.S. has little or no moral authority on the issue today.

James DiEugenio is a researcher and writer on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and other mysteries of that era. His most recent book is Reclaiming Parkland.

[outsider]

Something struc me as odd about the 'apparent' first knowledge of Israel's nukes being 1968; I was sure they had them during the Six-Day War in 1967 (re 'USS Liberty' books).
As the excert below shows, the US knew Israel was putting nuclear warheads on rockets in 1966.

As for LBJ's reaction, it doesn't surprise me one iota - not only did he collude with Israel to attack the 'Liberty', he planned to use it as an excuse to nuke Egypt, and the nuke-loaded planes were on the way to bomb Egypt from the Sixth Fleet and a North American base, but were recalled with three minutes to spare, because the 'Liberty' did not sink. LBJ was 100% 'Israel's Man'.
JFK, of course, was determined to stop Israel getting the bomb, and that, I believe, along with his printing US Government dollars (an existential threat to the Federal Reserve) were major factors in his assassination, though there were many more as well.

'History Of Nuclear Weapons - Israel':
http://www.rense.com/general26/historw.htm

'.....Although the United States government did not encourage or approve of the Israeli nuclear program, it also did nothing to stop it. Walworth Barbour, US ambassador to Israel from 1961-73, the bomb program's crucial years, primarily saw his job as being to insulate the President from facts which might compel him to act on the nuclear issue, alledgedly saying at one point that "The President did not send me there to give him problems. He does not want to be told any bad news." After the 1967 war, Barbour even put a stop to military attachÈs' intelligence collection efforts around Dimona. Even when Barbour did authorize forwarding information, as he did in 1966 when embassy staff learned that Israel was beginning to put nuclear warheads in missiles, the message seemed to disappear into the bureaucracy and was never acted upon.

In early 1968, the CIA issued a report concluding that Israel had successfully started production of nuclear weapons. This estimate, however, was based on an informal conversation between Carl Duckett, head of the CIA's Office of Science and Technology, and Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb. Teller said that, based on conversations with friends in the Israeli scientific and defense establishment, he had concluded that Israel was capable of building the bomb, and that the CIA should not wait for an Israeli test to make a final assessment because that test would never be carried out.

CIA estimates of the Israeli arsenal's size did not improve with time. In 1974, Duckett estimated that Israel had between ten and twenty nuclear weapons. The upper bound was derived from CIA speculation regarding the number of possible Israeli targets, and not from any specific intelligence. Because this target list was presumed to be relatively static, this remained the official American estimate until the early 1980s.

The actual size and composition of Israel's nuclear stockpile is uncertain, and is the subject of various estimates and reports. It is widely reported that Israel had two bombs in 1967, and that Prime Minister Eshkol ordered them armed in Israel's first nuclear alert during the Six-Day War. It is also reported that, fearing defeat in the October 1973 Yom Kippur War, the Israelis assembled 13 twenty-kiloton atomic bombs......'


From James DiEugenio's article above:
'......Because of that, the U.S. has little or no moral authority on the issue today. ...'
They have no moral authority for anything they do, but that doesn't stop them!!!