Revisiting the NUMEC Affair

Abstract

It is the story that won't go away–the possibility that in the 1960s Israel stole bomb-grade uranium from a U.S. nuclear fuel-processing plant. Now two former NRC officials explain what they think happened.

In a 1977 60 minutes interview, Mike Wallace asked then Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin whether he could, or would, shed any light on rumors that in the early 1960s Israel had stolen bomb-grade uranium from the United States. Begin ridiculed the question, but he didn't answer it directly: “From time to time, I read in the press the most fantastic stories–how everywhere Israel snatches away uranium from America and from Europe. It belongs to the James Bond stories–”

“Not so?” Wallace interjected.

“I don't pay any attention to them,” Begin answered.

Wallace let it go, and after a year or two of interest, so did the rest of the media, which is a shame, because when the known facts are put together, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that Israel probably did steal highly enriched uranium (HEU) from the United States.

The story landed in the press about a year before the Wallace/ Begin interview. It started, improbably, with James Conran, an engineer at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) who was angry about being denied access to an intelligence report on Israel's nuclear activities–a report he thought he needed to properly assess safeguards at U.S. commercial nuclear facilities against theft of bomb-capable materials. To address Conran's insistent complaints and to scotch rumors, NRC Chairman William Anders in February 1976 invited CIA Deputy Director Carl Duckett to brief about a dozen senior NRC officials. Instead of dismissing the rumors, Duckett stunned his audience by telling them that the CIA believed Israel had illegally obtained HEU from a fuel-processing plant run by the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (NUMEC) in Apollo, Pennsylvania, and that Israel used this HEU for its first bombs. 1 (Both coauthors worked at the NRC at the time and were involved in one or another aspect of the NUMEC affair–one as a commissioner who attended the CIA briefing and the other as the head of a task force charged with developing the NRC's response to Conran.)

Anders immediately passed along Duckett's information to James Connor, a smart, confident assistant to President Gerald Ford who knew his way around nuclear issues because he briefly had been director of planning and analysis at the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), the precursor to the NRC. 2 As Connor recounted it, he told Ford, “Mr. President, I have good news and bad news. The good news is that Israel definitely has the Bomb and can take care of itself. The bad news is that the stuff came from Pennsylvania.” 3 At Connor's urging, the Justice Department began looking into the matter.

Drawing on an earlier FBI case summary, Attorney General Edward Levi informed Ford that the FBI had never conducted “an investigation into the alleged discrepancy in nuclear materials at NUMEC because it was advised by the AEC that any loss likely was attributable to inadequate accounting procedures and that there was no evidence or suspicion of a violation of law.” 4 Levi listed several criminal statutes that might have been violated: Some dealt with unauthorized release of restricted data; two pointed to his suspicions that enriched uranium was unlawfully removed from Apollo; and three others referred to the possibility that federal officials concealed the events after the fact. He concluded: “I believe it necessary to conduct an investigation,” which he instructed the FBI to undertake. 5

The original investigation.

NUMEC started processing HEU at Apollo in the late 1950s, mostly for the AEC. However, by the early 1960s, worrisome signs appeared that the plant's security and accounting were deficient–even by that era's lenient standards. Here is how then AEC Chairman Glenn Seaborg described the situation in his 1993 book, The Atomic Energy Commission under Nixon: “The AEC's materials accountability system as of 1960, the year when the discrepancies were first noted at NUMEC … provided no means of ascertaining how much material a company might ship abroad other than by referring to the company's own records; there was no provision for AEC physical checks of shipments. The system did not require that [special nuclear material such as plutonium or enriched uranium] be physically protected within, or when in transit to and from, private plants. Nor was every private employee who handled [special nuclear material] required to have a security clearance or even to be a U.S. citizen…. In addition, AEC staff did not seem to emphasize vigorous enforcement even of existing requirements.” 6

AEC officials did complain about NUMEC's performance and began to lose patience with its lack of response. In 1965, after the company could not account for a substantial amount of HEU and dragged its feet about resolving the discrepancy, the AEC conducted its own careful inventory. 7 The commission concluded that there was about a 200-kilogram difference between the HEU supplied to the plant and the amount returned in product to customers. After accounting for processing losses, the fate of about 100 kilograms of HEU remained unexplained. Neither NUMEC nor the AEC could figure out where the missing HEU might have gone.

NUMEC's president Zalman Shapiro traveled frequently to Israel; NUMEC was a procurement and sales agent for the Israeli ministry of defense; and the company was involved in a partnership, called ISORAD, with Israel's nuclear organization to develop food irradiators, which involved sending large packages of radioactive sources to Israel.

Unexplained losses occurred at other commercial plants, but Apollo's losses were proportionately larger. 8 Equally troublesome were the extensive contacts NUMEC's president, Zalman Shapiro, an eminent chemist and inventor, had with the Israeli government. Shapiro traveled frequently to Israel; NUMEC was a procurement and sales agent for the Israeli ministry of defense; and the company was involved in a partnership, called ISORAD, with Israel's nuclear organization to develop food irradiators, which involved sending large packages of radioactive sources to Israel. 9

All of this left the AEC in an embarrassing fix. The commission had been aware that it was technically possible for foreign recipients to use HEU or plutonium fuel imported from the United States for nuclear weapons, but, incredible as it seems today, the agency had not given any thought to the possibility that individuals or groups could steal nuclear material within the United States. 10 Worse yet, public suspicion that bomb material had been stolen from a U.S. facility would undermine support for the AEC's grandiose nuclear projects. The commission's immediate concern, however, was how to deal with the inevitable questions from the powerful Joint Committee on Atomic Energy (JCAE)–the AEC's congressional overseer, and real boss. 11

At a key February 1966 meeting in preparation for congressional testimony, AEC Assistant General Manager Howard Brown said the basic AEC position “should be” that it had “no evidence or suspicion that diversion had occurred.” Seaborg emphasized the desirability of stressing to the JCAE the “theory” presented by Brown that no diversion had taken place. This theory, in Brown's opinion, made it unnecessary to formally involve the FBI–which had jurisdiction over all alleged or suspected criminal violations of the Atomic Energy Act. 12

Commissioner James Ramey asked about interviewing NUMEC personnel. Brown did not think much would come of it but agreed to do so. A month later, the AEC sent a team to Apollo to question NUMEC employees. To the dismay of team leaders, AEC attorney Marcus Rowden instructed them not to take any written statements and to cease questioning and return to Washington at the first indication of illegal activity. The investigators asked about 36 NUMEC employees only whether they knew about any diversion. 13 None did. Some guards volunteered that a diversion would have been possible, but that information did not seem to gain traction.

While the AEC “investigated” the HEU loss, the FBI restricted itself to briefly examining whether the ISORAD arrangement required Shapiro to register as a foreign agent. The Justice Department concluded that it did not. 14 The AEC then talked the FBI out of investigating the possibility of diversion on grounds that the AEC had found no suspected criminal violations, just sloppy accounting. 15 In short, the AEC took the position that diversion was so unlikely that there was no need to consider it at all. In retrospect, it looks as though the agency's single-minded interest in nuclear power expansion smothered any security concerns.

Suspicions continue to mount.

The case, however, was revived a couple of years later after clandestine U.S. environmental sampling around Israel's nuclear weapons facility at Dimona detected minute traces of HEU that reportedly bore the signature of an enrichment plant in Portsmouth, Ohio. 16 It is unclear from public documents how firm the evidence was, but an unambiguous identification would have been possible if the samples were of ultra-HEU that was produced only at Portsmouth. Such uranium was used in U.S. naval reactor fuel and processed by NUMEC at Apollo. 17 Plus, the possibility that Israel had enriched uranium domestically was discounted, bringing additional attention to NUMEC. 18

In April 1968, Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms wrote to Attorney General Ramsey Clark in a memo that remains highly classified that HEU processed at Apollo might have ended up at Dimona and requested that the FBI resume its investigation of NUMEC. 19 (The CIA could not legally conduct such an investigation within the United States.) At about the same time, Helms informed President Lyndon B. Johnson of the CIA's suspicions. Johnson reportedly told Helms, “Don't tell anyone else, even [Secretary of State] Dean Rusk and [Defense Secretary] Robert McNamara.” 20

Two months later, Clark ordered the FBI to place Zalman Shapiro under electronic and physical surveillance, which revealed unusual meetings between Shapiro and known Israeli intelligence operatives that have never been explained. 21 For instance, Israeli scientific attachés, who the FBI believed were senior Israeli intelligence officers, frequently visited NUMEC. 22 Shapiro later admitted that he met with the head of Israeli military intelligence in Israel. 23 He also revealed to investigative reporter Seymour Hersh that he knew Binyamin Blumberg, the head of LAKAM, Israel's scientific intelligence operation. 24

Hoover and Mitchell still strongly urged the AEC to lift Shapiro's Q clearance, but Seaborg and the other commissioners refused, claiming to be concerned about the reaction of the scientific community.

In early 1969, the incoming Nixon administration, including the president himself, took a keen interest in the NUMEC case, but principally as one involving possible espionage rather than diversion. 25 Seaborg might have convinced the administration that it was futile to pursue the diversion charge. 26 The ensuing discussions, many of which are still secret, centered on what to do about Shapiro's Q clearance in light of what the FBI discovered. FBI records and Seaborg's memoirs show that at one time or another the issue occupied Attorney General John Mitchell, Defense Secretary Melvin Laird, Deputy Defense Secretary David Packard, White House Counsel John Ehrlichman, science adviser Ed David, National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, Secretary of State William Rogers, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, and, of course, Seaborg himself.

In June 1969, Shapiro had a rushed meeting at Pittsburgh International Airport with another Israeli scientific attaché, Jeruham Kafkafi, which Shapiro again had difficulty explaining. Interviewed by AEC security two months later, Shapiro, surprised that the AEC knew about the meeting, first claimed it was about an overdue invoice. When the AEC interviewers didn't buy his story, he called back to say Kafkafi asked about an individual at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, whose name he could not remember. 27 (A possible explanation: Because the meeting came right before what was to be the last U.S. inspection of Dimona, Kafkafi might have sought information about U.S. team members who were assigned to the inspection.) Despite such dissembling, Shapiro did not lose Seaborg's backing or that of the AEC commissioners. In its report on the Shapiro interview to JCAE Chairman Chet Holifield, the AEC admitted that Shapiro was “less than completely candid” in discussing his relationship with Israeli officials, but that the commission “does not contemplate further action in this matter at this time.” 28

Hoover and Mitchell still strongly urged the AEC to lift Shapiro's Q clearance and to do so without a hearing–something the AEC could have done under its rules. But Seaborg and the other commissioners refused, claiming to be concerned about the reaction of the scientific community. 29 As such, the FBI discontinued its active investigation in September 1969. 30

The actual HEU losses at Apollo.

The heated high-level discussions in Washington about Shapiro's security clearance deflected attention from diversion at Apollo, where it turned out later there was more to worry about than the 100 kilograms of HEU that were discovered to be missing in 1965. In 2001, the Energy Department reconstructed NUMEC's “unaccounted for” losses of HEU throughout its operating history. 31 Energy's analysis showed that the unexplained losses for the period between 1966 and 1968 were even larger than the ones discovered earlier, a matter that received little or no attention from the AEC, FBI, or any other agency. Apparently, everyone assumed that after the 1965 imbroglio and a 1967 change in plant ownership–it was bought by ARCO–security and material accounting at Apollo would have improved sufficiently so that any subsequent theft could be ruled out. However, Shapiro stayed on as president and kept his senior management team intact until he left the company in October 1970. Only when the Babcock and Wilcox Company (B&W) bought the plant in 1971 did accounting and protection practices come up to industry standards.

Energy's 2001 report stated that Apollo's cumulative HEU loss from the start of operations in 1957 through 1968 was 269 kilograms of uranium 235, including the approximately 100 kilograms that were found to be missing in 1965. It also reported that only 76 kilograms were unaccounted for in the period from January 1969 until 1978, including the eight years that B&W ran the operation, during which the plant's HEU “throughput” increased substantially. 32 Records from the time indicate that losses of HEU in the 10 years of operation through 1968 exceeded 2 percent of HEU throughput while losses in the 10 years after 1968 were less than 0.2 percent of throughput. 33

The large unexplained losses in the period from 1966 to 1968 cast an ominous light on a September 1968 visit to NUMEC by four Israeli intelligence operatives. In its request to AEC security to approve the visitors, NUMEC identified the four as Rafael Eitan (“chemist, Ministry of Defense, Israel”); Avraham Bendor (“Department of Electronics, Israel”); Ephraim Biegun (“Department of Electronics, Israel”); and Avraham Hermoni (“scientific counselor, Israeli Embassy, Washington”). 34 They were supposedly there to discuss the purchase of small plutonium 238 power sources, but they were an astonishingly inappropriate group for that purpose. Eitan was not a chemist; he was a high-level, highly experienced Mossad agent who was reputed “not to have missed an operation” and established an early reputation for “killing without hesitation.” 35 He headed the team that captured Adolf Eichmann in Argentina in 1960, and he might have previously visited Apollo in the early 1960s. 36 Later, he became an adviser to Prime Minister Begin and headed LAKAM. 37

Bendor's real name–the one he adopted in Israel–was Avraham Shalom. He was a long-time agent of Shin Bet, Israel's internal intelligence arm. He also served as Eitan's right-hand man in Eichmann's capture. He became the head of Shin Bet in 1981, but he was forced to retire in 1986 after he ordered, and then covered up, the deaths of two Palestinian prisoners. 38 Biegun was the head of the Mossad's Technical Department; his specialty was electronics and communication. 39 Unlike the others, Hermoni was what NUMEC reported him to be–the scientific counselor at Israel's embassy in Washington. But he also had been technical director of Israel's nuclear bomb project at RAFAEL, Israel's armament development authority, and he played an important role in the Dimona project. 40 And as scientific counselor, he presumably was part of LAKAM's operations. 41

The Israelis would have been very interested at the time in getting HEU. And they obviously knew the opportunities for diversion NUMEC presented. Nor did they shy away from complex clandestine activities, especially in support of the country's nuclear weapons program.

There is no indication in released FBI and AEC documents that anyone asked why these four intelligence operatives were at the Apollo plant in 1968 or questioned NUMEC's false statement of their affiliations. It does not make sense that they were seeking technical information, because at least three of them were not expert in the technologies applied at Apollo. It had to be something else, something important enough to risk drawing attention to themselves and Shapiro. The Israelis would have been very interested at the time in getting HEU. And they obviously knew the opportunities for diversion NUMEC presented. Nor did they shy away from complex clandestine activities, especially in support of the country's nuclear weapons program. It is hard to believe that the Israeli intelligence establishment would have let such a tempting opportunity slip away.

Why did Israel have such a strong interest in obtaining HEU at the time? First, in the early 1960s, the Israelis could not have been sure that their plutonium complex would work as designed and on their desired schedule. Second, weapon designers always want the flexibility of having both plutonium and HEU. Finally, as some have suggested, the HEU could have been used as a driver fuel at Dimona to increase production of plutonium and tritium. 42

Had the FBI known about the Plumbat affair at the time, in which Israeli secret services illegally slipped 200 tons of yellow-cake, or uranium oxide, out of Europe a mere two months after Eitan, Bendor, Biegun, and Hermoni met with Shapiro in 1968, the bureau might have taken more seriously Israel's by-any-means-necessary approach to securing nuclear weapons. But the FBI did not know about the Plumbat operation because the Europeans kept it quiet for more than a decade out of embarrassment. 43 Any lingering doubts that Israel would conduct an illegal diversion of HEU at NUMEC because it risked alienating Washington were erased further by the mid-1980s Jonathan Pollard spying operation, during which Israel obtained thousands of highly classified U.S. intelligence documents.

In a book about the Pollard operation, Wolf Blitzer, the former Washington correspondent for the Jerusalem Post and current CNN anchor, wrote: “One inescapable conclusion of the Pollard affair is that Israel's famous chutzpah can be a source of weakness as well as strength. It has enabled Israel to survive in a very dangerous part of the world. Yet it also has engendered a widely held attitude among Israeli officials that Israel can get away with the most outrageous things. There is a notion among many Israelis that their American counterparts are not too bright, that they can be ‘handled’ thanks partially to the pro-Israel lobby's clout in Congress.” 44

The story that just will not die.

In response to Attorney General Edward Levi's April 1976 instructions, the FBI resumed its NUMEC-related interviews but to little avail. As James Connor later told reporter John Fialka, the investigative trail had become cold: “You could look at all the documents and ask yourself whether something had happened here. The answer was probably yes. Then the question was whether you could do anything about it, and the answer was no.” 45

During the transition to the Carter administration, Ford's assistants alerted Carter's team to the existence of the most important CIA and FBI documents concerning the NUMEC case. 46 The FBI continued interviewing people, apparently driven by congressional interest. The later FBI reports, some still heavily redacted, describe interviews with ex-NUMEC employees and add suggestive details concerning the possibility of illicit shipments from Apollo to Israel. According to an earlier interview report, NUMEC delivered a 600-pound package, listed as containing neutron sources, to El Al Airlines in December 1963. 47 It turns out the AEC's 1965 inventory showed that more HEU went missing from the Apollo plant in 1963 than any other year. Former NUMEC employees also told FBI agents about strange truck shipments in the 1960s. The trucks went directly to Israeli ships docked in the New York area. One recalled an unusual truck loading what looked to be HEU containers from the plant one night in 1965 or 1966. He said that an armed guard ordered him to leave the area. Others claimed to have been threatened by NUMEC managers to keep quiet about what they saw at the loading docks. 48 Whether or not these accounts are reliable is hard to say. 49 In any event, the FBI does not appear to have followed up on them.

The House Interior Committee, NRC's principal oversight committee after the JCAE's demise in 1977, also looked into the possible Israeli connection. In fact, Committee Chairman Morris Udall personally conducted an interview with Zalman Shapiro. Udall had been a prosecutor, and he was as fair-minded a congressman as could be found. When a BBC interviewer asked him in 1979 if he thought the Israelis had taken HEU from Apollo, he replied, “If someone had me write in an envelope whether a diversion occurred or did not occur and that I would be put to death if I answered wrong, I suspect I would have to put in the envelope that I believe there was a diversion.” 50

The top NRC official responsible for overseeing nuclear fuel plants told Congress that a 1980 NRC study on NUMEC proved “a knowledgeable insider could quite easily have obtained the material in [the apollo] plant … [and it] would have been very, very difficult to detect.”

In 1980, at Udall's urging, NRC security experts looked carefully into the possibility of an alleged diversion from NUMEC. They concluded: “It is possible that significant quantities of [HEU] could have been removed from the NUMEC Apollo facility during the mid-1960s, by a knowledgeable insider or an outside group with assistance of an insider, without detection. It is, of course, possible that no such removal occurred. Our review did not develop any information to indicate that a theft did or did not occur, only that the system would not have been able to detect a theft.” 51

The top NRC official responsible for overseeing nuclear fuel plants told Congress that the NRC study on NUMEC proved “a knowledgeable insider could quite easily have obtained the material in that plant … [and it] would have been very, very difficult to detect.” 52

A frequently encountered canard espoused most notably by Hersh in his book The Samson Option is that the missing HEU was recovered when the Apollo plant was taken apart. 53 Beginning in 1978, B&W did carefully dismantle Apollo, recovering HEU containing 95 kilograms of uranium 235 from equipment and structures, and estimating that another 31 kilograms was left unrecovered in the concrete floor and walls, for a sum of 126 kilograms. But the cumulative “material unaccounted for”–the unexplained missing amount–for the entire 1957-78 period of HEU operations at Apollo was 463 kilograms. 54 That leaves 337 kilograms as the cumulative amount of HEU still unaccounted for–more than three times the amount unaccounted for in the 1965 inventory. In other words, the fact that about 100 kilograms of uranium 235 in the form of HEU was found during post-1978 decommissioning does not eliminate the possibility that the 100 kilograms of HEU that the AEC could not account for in Apollo's 1965 inventory, or the larger amount that went missing during the 1966-68 period, was diverted.

Ironically, the 89-year-old Shapiro has now revived this very point, claiming that the missing material was recovered and that this exonerates him. In August 2009, at the urging of Shapiro's lawyer, Pennsylvania Democratic Sen. Arlen Specter wrote to the NRC asking the agency to reexamine the case with a view toward “confirming that Shapiro was not involved in any activities related to the diversion of uranium.” 55 In its response to Specter the NRC chose instead to address the larger question of diversion–saying it had no “specific evidence” of a diversion but it couldn't rule it out “unequivocally.” It was a cautious, bureaucratic response; nevertheless, it was a remarkable statement by a federal agency because it leaves open the possibility that Israel stole bomb-grade uranium from the United States unbeknownst to all the government agencies tasked with preventing such a thing from happening.

Why now?

We recount the NUMEC affair now not to pursue Shapiro and others who may have been involved in it. In a sense Shapiro was a red herring in the case. By personalizing the NUMEC investigations around him, the government lost sight of the real issue–the missing HEU.

We do think, however, that the circumstantial evidence supports the conclusion that the HEU ended up in Israel. It seems to us self-evident that if the federal government knows something about how NUMEC and/or Shapiro helped Israel get the Bomb, the public has a right to know the details. A good starting point would be to declassify key CIA and FBI documents pertaining to the NUMEC case.

Perhaps the most worrisome aspect of the NUMEC affair is that the government itself did not seem to want to find out what happened because it feared the answer. In his last book, Adventures in the Atomic Age, Seaborg defended this head-in-the-sand approach by questioning “what sense” it made to pursue the case. 56 For our part, getting at the truth makes sense enough.