Spies Against Armageddon (27 page)

In the almost six decades after the construction of the reactor, Israeli scientists and Lakam’s acquisition teams secured four providers. France was first, then came some European and American companies, followed by South Africa in the 1970s. The fourth source was Israel itself, as rich reservoirs of chemicals were mined and extracted from the Negev desert.

There was an American man in the nuclear business who clearly helped Israel, but in ways that no one was willing to explain fully. Zalman Shapiro was the founder of Numec—the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation—in Apollo, Pennsylvania, a tiny town northeast of Pittsburgh

Born in Ohio in 1921, the son of an Orthodox rabbi, Shapiro lost many relatives in the Holocaust and himself faced anti-Semitism even while earning his Ph.D. in chemistry in 1948. The founding of the State of Israel that same year clearly inspired him, as he joined Zionist organizations including Friends of the Technion, which raised funds for Israel’s top technological university.

His company supplied uranium to nuclear reactors in the United States, but in the early 1960s, Numec seemed to have an inordinate number of foreign visitors. They came mainly from France and Israel.

America’s Atomic Energy Commission, the AEC, also noticed that Numec’s records showed significant quantities of enriched uranium missing. No proof of any crime was found, but in 15 years of investigations, the AEC reported that 587 pounds of uranium had mysteriously vanished—enough, in theory, to make at least 11 atomic bombs.

FBI investigators focused on Shapiro’s ties with Israel, but could not arrive at any clear conclusion. They tapped his phone calls and questioned him, yet he denied ever diverting anything to anyone. Still, the FBI and the CIA believed that he had somehow gotten weapons-grade uranium to Israel.

Investigators said that Shapiro did admit to having meetings with Avraham Hermoni, the scientific counselor at the Israeli embassy in Washington. Hermoni, in secret, was the Lakam station chief.

While the CIA was not aware of the existence of Lakam within the Defense Ministry, it did know that Israeli intelligence was deeply involved in industrial espionage aimed at helping military projects. A classified booklet written by the CIA in 1976,
Israel: Foreign Intelligence and Security Services Survey
, makes no mention of Lakam or of Binyamin Blumberg.

Investigations of Shapiro and Numec, as well as probes into other nuclear-related matters, caused a great deal of concern in Israel. The Mossad’s best friend in the CIA, James Angleton, had shielded Israeli projects from scrutiny, but his influence diminished by the late 1960s. A new CIA director, Richard Helms, was notably suspicious about Israeli motives and actions.

To explore the situation in Washington and in Pennsylvania, four Israelis—including Hermoni; the Mossad’s kidnapping expert, Rafi Eitan; and future Shin Bet director Avraham Bendor (who later changed his surname to Shalom)—dropped in on Shapiro’s Numec plant in September 1968. Although Eitan and Bendor were certainly not scientists by vocation, they listed themselves as “chemists for the Defense Ministry” in an application for U.S. government clearance to visit the nuclear facility.

When they returned home from their damage assessment mission, Eitan and Bendor/Shalom reported that Israel was still enjoying the benefit of any doubt and could get away with quiet uranium procurement.

By 1976, American suspicions grew with a further twist.

The CIA’s deputy director for science and technology, Carl Duckett, told selected members of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission what he had concluded—largely based on consultations with Edward Teller, a Hungarian Jew who grew up to be hailed as “the father of America’s hydrogen bomb” and visited Israeli atomic scientists as Yuval Ne’eman’s guest. The conventional understanding among researchers is that Duckett told the meeting that Israel at that point, in 1976, already had possessed nuclear bombs for about eight years.

Yet, one of the members of the NRC who heard Duckett gave a completely different account in 2004. Victor Gilinsky wrote that the CIA science chief’s purpose had been “to deal with rumors about a deeper secret in the CIA reports, one that had an even bigger potential for political disaster, and one that I believe was the real reason for the hyper-secrecy.”

Gilinsky continued: “What Duckett confirmed, to everyone’s astonishment, was that the CIA believed that the nuclear explosives in Israel’s first several bombs, about 100 kilograms of bomb-grade uranium in all, came from material that was missing” from Numec, which “had exceptionally close and suspicious ties to Israel. The firm’s sloppy material accounting could have masked the removal of the bomb-grade uranium. After numerous investigations and reinvestigations, the facts remain unclear.”

It may be mere coincidence, but in the 1990s the philanthropic Shapiro was listed as a prominent contributor to the Israel Intelligence Heritage and Commemoration Center, a non-profit group hoping to build a museum in Israel, closely linked with the intelligence community. Its founder and first president was Meir Amit, succeeded by another former Mossad director, Efraim Halevy. Considered a brilliant inventor, Shapiro clearly knew a lot and made friends with some of the most important people in Israel’s clandestine defense system.

Blumberg’s Lakam certainly kept working with the Mossad and Sakharov’s German network, executing stunningly innovative missions to acquire materials for Israel’s secret weapon. One of the most complicated, successful, and daring capers—stretching from Africa to Europe, to the high seas of the Mediterranean—became known as the Plumbat Affair.

This imaginative gem of spycraft would be the inspiration for a thriller by Ken Follett,
Triple
, and in real life a reminder to authorities of the kind of smuggling that could deceive customs officials and nuclear inspectors everywhere and anytime.

In essence, Israel managed in 1968 to purchase a huge quantity of radioactive “yellowcake” in sealed oil drums mislabeled “plumbat”—meaning that they contained lead. The sale was made by a Belgian company, and the cargo was shipped illegally under the nose of Euratom—the nuclear regulatory body for Europe—and then vanished, as far as official shipping records were concerned.

It all began in December 1965, when Sakharov wrote a letter to top officials at Israel’s defense ministry. He said that one of his business acquaintances in Belgium had told him about a surplus of uranium simply waiting for a buyer. Most ministry officials were skeptical, but Blumberg had high faith in Sakharov’s ability and asked the clever volunteer to coordinate the entire effort.

It would take nearly three years to design the almost perfect plot. When all seemed ready, Sakharov asked his German friend Schulzen—always happy to earn fat commissions—to have the Asmara company place the order to purchase the uranium.

It had been mined in the former Belgian Congo, the same African source that provided uranium for the first American atomic bombs. A company in Belgium, Société Générale de Minerais (SGM), had been sitting on the material for years and was happy to sell it—around 200 tons of yellowcake—for a total of four million dollars.

Asmara’s office in Germany told SGM and Euratom that the uranium would be part of a chemical process for producing colored fabrics. The end user was to be Saica, an Italian company in Milan specializing in textile dyes. Saica’s chief executive was a good friend of Schulzen. Euratom approved the transaction, as the radioactive materials would simply be going from one European country to another for an industrial purpose—and the regulators did not even think about the absurdity of Saica, practically bankrupt and lacking any proper facilities, using uranium.

Meantime, Sakharov worked with Rafi Eitan, then head of Mossad operations in Europe, to register a shipping company in Switzerland by the name of Biscayne Trading Corporation. Using a mysterious Turkish maritime intermediary and a Norwegian ship broker, the corporation purchased a small and unimpressive cargo ship called
Scheersberg A
, built in Germany and flying Liberia’s flag of convenience.

The owner of the corporation was Dan Ert-Aerbel, who five years later would be arrested in Norway for his involvement in the Mossad’s mistaken assassination of a waiter. The Danish-born Israeli had been working for the Mossad, on and off, since 1962. In 1973, after mistakenly revealing his claustrophobia, he told Norwegian interrogators everything: not only about the murder in Lillehammer, but also, “I was the owner of the uranium ship.”

The Plumbat plot, though complicated, went off without a hitch. The uranium was packed into 560 drums by the Belgian vendor in November 1968, then transported by train to the port of Antwerp and loaded onto the
Scheersberg A
. The ship’s captain, a trusted officer in the Israeli navy, wrote in its log book that the destination would be Genoa, but it never got to Italy.

He changed course in the Mediterranean and rendezvoused with another Israeli merchant vessel that was being guarded by two missile boats. Eitan and Sakharov had also purchased this ship, and its captain was Itai Be’eri—a neat bit of historical irony, as his late father Isser had been the first commander of military intelligence, fired for ordering a wrongful execution in 1948 and for being too rough on other suspects. The young Be’eri now got to restore some family honor.

Within a few hours, the drums containing radioactive yellowcake were winched from one ship to the other, which then sailed to the new Israeli port of Ashdod. Blumberg and Sakharov waited for it on the piers and witnessed the unloading of the cargo. Trucks then took the drums to the nuclear bomb factory in Dimona.

The
Scheersberg A
, two weeks after it was due in Italy, instead docked at a port in eastern Turkey. The ship was empty, and the captain and crew immediately disappeared. Several books were written about this controversial, impressive, and never acknowledged achievement by Israeli intelligence. But neither Blumberg nor Sakharov was mentioned at all.

Israel pulled off another coup on the water on Christmas Eve in 1969, when navy personnel—with the tacit cooperation of some French officers—took control of five missile boats that Israel had purchased from France and sailed them out of the harbor at Cherbourg. President de Gaulle, punishing Israel for the 1967 war, had imposed an arms embargo. He was livid that the Israelis now, as he saw it, were behaving like thieves in the night.

Lakam and the Mossad helped the navy by providing yet another cargo vessel—purchased by phony companies in Norway and Panama—to refuel the missile boats on their voyage to Israel. Those small but potent attack vessels would become very important to Israel, first in the October 1973 war and even beyond that, as government-owned Israel Aircraft Industries (IAI) was able to adapt the French model and built even better missile boats.

Sakharov’s friendships proved valuable again, when the entire network built around Asmara Chemie came under scrutiny. Germany’s domestic security service started investigating illegal activities by Asmara. Prime Minister Golda Meir was made aware of the threat, and she was concerned. Sakharov rushed to Germany to coordinate cover stories with Schulzen, but the probe continued.

He then went to see another former Nazi pilot, now an industrialist in Zurich, Switzerland. Their bond was not business, but a shared passion for music. The industrialist had another friend, Horst Ehmke, who was the West German cabinet minister overseeing his country’s intelligence agencies. Sakharov pointed out that the German government could fall if everything about Asmara were revealed. The ex-pilot contacted Ehmke, and the investigation was dropped.

Lakam’s next coup was in Switzerland. Israeli operatives penetrated a company that manufactured engines for France’s Mirage warplane, using the classic intelligence technique of looking for a weak link in the staff. They identified a Swiss engineer, Alfred Frauenknecht, who had several promising attributes: his resentment of the company, his need for cash to afford having a mistress, and his positive feelings for Israel after the Six-Day War.

He was rather easy to persuade to provide something of immense value to Israel: a complete set of blueprints for the Mirage jet. Frauenknecht accepted cash, but made sure to point out that he was acting mainly out of personal commitment.

The engineer got his nephew to help him make copies and deliver them to a truck driver. The documents were then driven to the Israeli military attaché in Rome.

Swiss authorities became suspicious and tried to arrest the driver, but he managed to escape and called his Israeli controller for instructions. The controller told him to drive to Germany, and one of the Asmara Chemie executives then helped get the precious documents to the Israeli embassy in Bonn.

The driver was then smuggled to Belgium, where Eitan sheltered him for a while and then sent him safely to Israel. The driver was not Israeli, but he was safe.

Frauenknecht, however, was arrested; and Swiss interrogators persuaded him to confess. He said the Israelis had promised him a million dollars for the Mirage plans, and so far he had received $200,000. A Swiss court in 1971 found him guilty of espionage, but the judges seemed to respect his motives—as he still stressed his affection toward Israel, rather than greed—and the convicted spy spent only one year in prison.

That same year, Israel’s air force started flying a new, domestically-produced warplane: the Nesher (Eagle). It was obviously a copy of France’s Mirage 5.

IAI added modifications to make an even better jet fighter, the Kfir (Cub), which was proudly unveiled in April 1975. The Kfir also bore an uncanny resemblance to the Mirage, and the man responsible for that—Frauenknecht—made his first visit to Israel to see the inaugural flight, looking up and knowing he had something to do with that silver streak across the Mediterranean sky.

Israeli intelligence chiefs were ambivalent, however, in their attitude toward the man who was caught and served time. The Israeli government did not even pay his airfare from Switzerland, and he felt abandoned by his operators.