Abstract
In may, gideon frank, israel's nuclear czar, came to Washington to meet Spencer Abraham, the new secretary of Energy. Frank's mission was to preserve an important achievement, a cooperative agreement he reached last year with former Energy Secretary Bill Richardson. Israeli officials feared that the new Republican leaders in Washington would simply let it go. Instead, Abraham assured Frank that the Bush administration would honor the agreement.
The “letter of intent,” signed by Richardson and Frank on February 22, 2000, in Jerusalem, calls for expanding “cooperative technical activities to promote nonproliferation, arms control, and regional security.” While its scope is explicitly limited to non-sensitive matters, the document's goal is to promote defense, not civilian scientific research. Formalizing a long-term tacit relationship between the nuclear establishments, the agreement gives at least some U.S. legitimacy to the secretive Israeli nuclear program.
Like the U.S Energy Department, Israel's Atomic Energy Commission (IAEC) runs the nation's nuclear facilities, centered at the Dimona complex. Its main mission is deterrence. The IAEC has a foreign relations arm, which represents the country at the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna and liaises with the United States on nuclear matters of mutual interest. In recent years, the focus of this U.S.-Israeli cooperation has been the threat from nuclear-hungry Middle Eastern countries.
The possibility of an Iranian or Iraqi nuclear weapon is perceived in Jerusalem as a grave threat. To maintain its regional nuclear monopoly, the Israelis want help from their American allies, who have long turned a blind eye toward Israel's own nuclear activities, which prosper outside the NPT.
Israel's nuclear facility at Dimona.
Washington and Jerusalem have shared an unwritten understanding since 1969. Israel keeps quiet about its nuclear program, and the United States avoids pressuring it to join the NPT. In the past decade, the two countries' policies grew even closer. The Clinton administration warmed to the idea of regional arms control regimes, and Israel became more open to globally applied norms of behavior, signing the Chemical Weapons Convention and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT)–although both have yet to be ratified. In 1998, following the Israeli-Palestinian Wye River accord, Clinton promised in a secret letter to then-Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu to preserve Israel's strategic deterrent. When the February 2000 agreement was signed, relations between the Barak government and Clinton administration were at their peak.
Israeli and U.S. authorities have collaborated in recent years to monitor developments in Iraq and Iran, keeping an especially close eye on the flow of Russian technology to Iran's nuclear power project at Bushehr. In the past, Israeli officials say they were received with relative openness at the State Department, where their chief contact was Bob Einhorn, then assistant secretary for nonproliferation. The Energy Department, however, was more “shy,” a senior Israeli official told me. For instance, IAEC scientists were less than welcome on visits to U.S. national laboratories, for which they had to undergo lengthy, intensive screenings.
But Richardson, who took office in July 1998, changed Energy's attitude. An aspiring politician who aimed to become vice president or secretary of state in a Democratic administration, Richardson was a strong supporter of Israel. During his term as U.N. ambassador, he followed the close cooperation between Israel and the U.N. Special Commission in Iraq. As Energy Secretary, he had good rapport with the Israeli nuclear commissioner. Asked recently about his Israeli counterpart, Richardson said: “Gideon Frank is a first-rate scientist and political operator, who advanced Israel's energy interests well. We worked together on expanding access to Israeli scientists in our national labs.”
In early 2000, Richardson and Frank negotiated the cooperation agreement, making sure that the text was consistent with American anti-proliferation legislation and policies. The State Department prepared a short press briefing, saying that nothing new had come up in the U.S.-Israeli ongoing relationship, but that the agreement would “strengthen our global goals” against proliferation. “No comment” was the only response to questions about the Israeli nuclear program.
The 2000 agreement covers two major fields of cooperation: verification technologies and the assimilation of Russian nuclear expertise. Israel wants a monitoring mechanism back at work in Iraq, as well as a better way to observe Iran's activities. The letter of intent specifically calls for a joint technical effort to promote seismic monitoring for CTBT verification, and for the assessment of “international nuclear safeguards measures” and of “monitoring technologies for regional security.” Israeli officials met their American counterparts and were invited last year to the Cooperative Monitoring Center at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico.
Also last year, an American team visited Israel to gain firsthand experience with turning ex-Soviet scientists to civilian work. Energy wanted to learn from Israel's absorption of Russian immigrants and their integration into civilian “technology nurseries.” Israel supports Energy's effort to find employment for Russian nuclear personnel, which reduces the pool of scientists who might find work in Iran.
No classified information is to flow among officials and scientists through the U.S.-Israeli agreement; nevertheless, it establishes a dialogue between nuclear experts, allowing the United States to engage the Israeli nuclear program in a minor way.
The agreement calls for an annual meeting between the agencies to review progress and to discuss future cooperation. On the American side, the point man is Gen. John Gordon, undersecretary of energy and administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, who took office in June 2000. Gordon knows Israel well. In his previous position as deputy director of the CIA, he negotiated with Israeli top brass the contents of an American aid package that was part of a peace deal with Syria.
The Israelis are now waiting to see how the new administration will fulfill the nuclear agreement. Not much has happened recently, despite Abraham's pledge to keep it alive. A senior Israeli official told me that Energy has been preoccupied with other issues, like appointments and the California energy crisis, and that the Israeli file has been set aside for the time being. “We will have to restart the process,” said the official. “No one wants to do away with the agreement, but there seems to be no rush either.”