The American Connection: How Israel Got the Bomb
Fialka, John J.
The American Connection: HOW ISRAEL GOT THE BOMB by John J. Fialka During the late 1960s, Central Intelligence Agency operatives were able to prove something that U.S. officials had...
...Zalman Shapiro, and it is clear from the reference that he had been the topic of some discussion during the briefing...
...Two days after the report came in, Brown and NU M EC’s lawyers concluded an elaborate series of negotiations over how much the company would have to pay for the missing metal...
...Certain U.S...
...The CIA’S highly sophisticated array of monitoring equipment had found evidence that somewhere in Israel there was a laboratory working with sizable quantities of highly enriched uraniumthe same metal used to incinerate Hiroshima in the closing days of World War 11...
...How could the NRC carry out its responsibility to protect against possible diversions of nuclear materials if it was not fully informed about incidents t h a t may have occurred in the past...
...The packet is still classified as secret, but the cover letter was later released...
...In that fragment there is no mention of NUMEC as the source of Israel’s alleged A-bomb capability...
...No similar plant had ever reported losses of that magnitude...
...The only problem, he said, was that because of the weather and various engineering considerations, he would not be able to dig up the pit until the following spring...
...No new uranium supplies were coming into the plant, so the mixing that had troubled AEC inspectors was no longer possible...
...As one memo put it: “[Shapiro] reported that while he felt confident that the 1963 pit contained the missing material, he was reluctant to gamble that it might not be there...
...recruiting scientists, all of whom were Jews, for work on various technical problems confronting Israel...
...If you’re cooking a small thing in a large pot, then you have something that sticks to the pot...
...In addition to American c o n t r a c t s , Shapiro developed a string of foreign clients who wanted uranium fuel for various nuclear processes...
...Presiding over what was billed as an “u n c 1 ass if i ed ” stat e- o f- t he - w o r 1 d intelligence briefing, Duckett apparently felt relaxed among the aerospace executives and familiar surroundingsso relaxed that when one executive wondered during a questionandanswer period whether the rumors about Israel having the bomb were true, Duckett set him straight...
...You could look at all the documents and ask yourself whether something had happened here...
...One of the chief defenders of this last theory is Shapiro, who left NUMEC in 1969 to go to Westinghouse, minus his security clearance...
...The inability of that company to come up with the material stimulated the commission to take a hard look at safeguard practices...
...Some of the records, the inspectors discovered, had been “inadvertently destroyed” in what t h e c o m p a n y d e s c r i b e d as an overzealous factory cleanup campaign a year earlier...
...Howard Brown, then the AEC’s general manager, and other AEC officials trying to account for the missing uranium weren’t about to wait that long for an answer...
...Shapiro was a research chemist, a veteran of the Manhattan Project, and the author, according to NU M EC brochures, “of a large number of classified documents...
...Duckett told the NRC commissioners that by the mid-1960s, the U.S...
...What we had was a small yield, high scrap operation,” he once told a reporter...
...We [the AEC] pointed out that he was asking the Commission to gamble that it might not be there, thus placing the Commission in an untenable position...
...In 1969, the new Attorney General, John Mitchell, wrote the CIA that he was closing the case because the Justice Department had no legal grounds “to hang its hat on...
...Even after this contract, NUMEC lapsed back into some of its old habits...
...The first theory is that the Johnson administration, perhaps aided by CIA operatives, authorized the diversion to help Israel prepare for the mounting Arab military threats that culminated in the 1967 Six Day War, The second is that NUMEC was a “free-lance” operation carried out by the CIA’S powerful pro-Israeli faction, which might have pointed out the way and illuminated the loopholes that were waiting to be exploited...
...It was stamped “Top Secret,” the highest national security classification...
...At the same time another, less healthy side of Shapiro’s business was evolving...
...It was so secret that its existence was classified a secret...
...Somebody had helped Israel over the threshold...
...Almost a million dollars’ worth of what should have been the most carefully guarded s u b s t a n c e in the w o r l d s i m p l y disappeared, thrown away in processes that could neither be detected nor explained later...
...The answer was yes...
...Shapiro became emotionally overcome” when Brown and the others argued that he had to continue digging for the uranium...
...The result was that, from the beginning, a sizable cocoon of secrecy was built up around the case, secrecy that did not begin to crumble until nearly a decade later, and then only because of the extraordinary lengths to which the government had gone to cover up...
...According to Duckett, the maneuver “would not have made sense unless it was to deliver a nuclear bo m b. ” From this and more direct evidence gathered by the CIA, Duckett said, in 1968 the agency had drawn up a N a t io na 1 I n t e l lige nce E s t i mat e reporting Israel’s entry into the nuclear club and submitted it to Richard Helms, then CIA director...
...One cubic inch of the extremely dense metal weighs about a pound and was then worth slightly more than $4,500...
...At one point, Mason exclaimed, “My God, 1 almost went to work for Zal Shapiro...
...In 1967, for example, Shapiro was asked to delay the plant’s annual inventory because AEC inspectors would be late in arriving to oversee the o p e r a t i o n . S h a p i r o ignored the request, and went ahead with his own inventory, a move, said the AEC inspectors, that made his inventory worthless as a tool to check the accuracy of the plant’s books...
...Several attempts to crack the code reportedly failed...
...By the end of the meeting it was a pretty somber group,” Duckett would later recall for the benefit of NRC i n v e s t i g a t o r s . Anders, he s a i d , announced t h a t , “in light of the sensitive nature of the information, he was going to the White House” with the NUMEC story...
...In fact, Shapiro told the AEC, there was probably more uranium in the pits than had been lost on the rocket fuel contract...
...company could ship more than the authorized amount of U-235 to a regular customer...
...Actually it is worth infinitely more than that, because that much U235, in the hands of an expert, can be made into a small atomic bomb...
...Among those with whom the AEC, and later the FBI, seemed most concerned were Baruch Cinai, an Israeli metallurgist, and Ephraim Lahav, the scientific attache to the Israeli embassy in Washington...
...The unraveling began in 1975, when James H. Conran, a young analyst in the division of safeguards of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (one of the two agencies formed when the Atomic Energy Commission dissolved in 1975),, was assigned to put together a h i s t o r y of the development of safeguards protecting the use of what the government called SNM, or Strategic Nuclear Materials...
...Carl Builder, then the NRC’s top safeguards official, had attended the briefing and decreed that because of its great sensitivity, the episode was “better left closed...
...Shapiro reassured everyone that the loss was not much to worry about...
...There was a tenminute recess after which a more composed Shapiro admitted he was upset about the loss of several government contracts, which had c o n t r i b u t e d t o r e c e n t b u s i n e s s reversals...
...The meeting is described in several memos written to the files, one of which states that “Dr...
...According to FBI sources, however, the surveillance continued afterward without the wiretap...
...On November 1, a special team of AEC inspectors descended on Apollo and, after a twoweek search, calculated that a total of 39 1 pounds of highly enriched uranium had disappeared at the plant between 1957 and November 1965...
...The third theory is that the diversion was carried out entirely by the Israelis, with help from either Shapiro or his underlings, who knew that his sloppy administration of the plant would set him up as the likely target for any resulting investigation...
...The 1963 pit was quickly opened, and on October 21, NUMEC had to admit that samples of the debris revealed only about ten per cent of the highly enriched uranium Shapiro had said would be found...
...It explains that the packet was stamped secret “because we indicated the number of nuclear weapons that possibly could have been made if t h e material had been diverted...
...Helms, Duckett recalled, told him not to distribute the estimate to other sections of the CIA or outside the agency, and added that he would take the report directly to President Lyndon Johnson...
...It [the law] was a very severe thing to work under,” Brown explains...
...The final bill was $929,000...
...It didn’t take long for the CIA to focus its suspicions on NUMEC, which had been giving federal regulators fits since 1961...
...scientists returning from the Middle East...
...His business flourished...
...Helping Israel Over the Threshold It is very, very difficult to obtain highly enriched uranium...
...The American Connection: HOW ISRAEL GOT THE BOMB by John J. Fialka During the late 1960s, Central Intelligence Agency operatives were able to prove something that U.S...
...At the time, NUMEC housed 2,400 classified documents, including detailed descriptions of secret military research and development programs...
...Most of the people who worked with Shapiro in NUMEC, for example, had never been interviewed...
...Conran was not invited...
...The question was whether Israel had quietly entered the world’s nuclear “club,” a possibility that had long been suggested by U.S...
...NUMEC was solicited for a bid-and then was selected from a list of four companies as the one “best qualified”-to handle a contract calling for the fabrication of fuel from almost three tons of plutonium, by far the largest quantity of that bomb-grade material ever placed in private hands...
...The highly enriched uranium, he said, was not really gone, it was still there at Apollo in two big waste pits that had been dug in 1962 and 1963 to hold some of NUMEC’s uranium debris...
...NUMEC), located in Apollo, Pennsylvania, a small town about 30 miles northeast of Pittsburgh...
...Four days later, when an account of Duckett’s remarks appeared in The Washington Post, there was a nonnuclear explosion within the executive suite at Langley...
...The FBI was not sent back into the case until 1976, after the Duckett briefing, and then only at the express request of President Ford...
...Howard Brown, then the assistant general manager of the AEC, described, in a memo to his files, how the "gap" might work: "Question: Is there any obvious way that a licensee or contractor licensee could divert materials to a foreign recipient...
...A Pittsburgh corporation, Apollo Industries Inc., advanced $450,000 in capital and also provided, rent-free, a former steel fabrication plant...
...Brown, now a lawyer in Washington, says that at the time of the report he still was not satisfied that there had not been any wrongdoing at the plant but did not think he had grounds for criminal prosecution: “1 felt we had reached a point where we really had to fish or cut bait...
...He became convinced that he could not write an accurate history of safeguards without knowing the full story of NUMEC...
...A sampling quickly showed, however, t h a t the pit contained only a small fraction of the highly enriched uranium wastes he had promised...
...The Most Artfully Hedged Statement If there is a prize somewhere in Washington for the bureaucrat who constructs the most artfully hedged statement, perhaps it should have been awarded to the man who drew up the March team’s report...
...They had the metal, but, the CIA concluded, they didn’t have the technological capability to produce highly enriched uranium...
...One gram of highly enriched uranium-about ,as much as could be placed on a pencil head-was worth $10 in the early 1960s...
...officials had wondered about for several years...
...In December 1975, Conran’s questions caught the ear of Edward Mason, then one of the NRC’s five commissioners, who, in turn, brought the matter to a head by telling the chairman of the NRC, William A. Anders, that if there was CIA material concerning NUMEC, as Conran suspected, the NRC was entitled to a briefing...
...As a result, the conclusion of the inspectors’ report was carefully hedged in language that set the tone for all future statements about NUMEC losses: “Although it cannot be stated with certainty that theft or diversion did not take place, the survey team found no evidence to suggest these possibilities...
...In the interim, memories had become hazy...
...There is, however, mention of NU M EC’s founder and first president, Dr...
...Around 1976 the National Security Council received a packet of information put together by NRC and ERDA weapons experts...
...It will come up to haunt each succeeding administration...
...Fallout from the explosion indicated that it had been a uranium bomb...
...James Hart, the engineer who served as production supervisor at NUMEC, told Brown’s sleuths that prior to 1964 “no one at NUMEC really seemed to care what happened to SNM...
...A f t e r s e v e r a l warnings, including a letter from Rickover’s office that a failure to apply strict controls on the aliens could amount to a violation of espionage laws, the AEC concluded in late 1963 that the security message was still not getting across...
...The CIA finally eased the concern over the Chinese bomb by locating a hitherto unknown Chinese uranium enrichment plant, but the conclusions of the Labowitz report continued to be extremely bothersome, especially when, only 6 months later, the AEC began to learn about the odd happenings at NUMEC...
...At that point, the Chinese were not known to have enrichment technology, and the AEC began to worry that somehow the metal for the Chinese bomb may have been diverted from the U.S...
...So was Senator Frank Church, at the time the chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence...
...Instead, Westinghouse was told the startling news: NUMEC didn’t have all of the uranium...
...It appears that the lack of an effective program can be attributed to a general apathy toward security which has permeated the e n t i r e NUMEC organization,” stated one AEC report after two security inspections...
...Shortly afterwards, the Dimona facilityestimated capable of producing enough plutonium for one bomb a year-was closed to all foreign visitors The First Scare The discovery, in 1965, that NUMEC had "lost" 206 pounds of highly enriched uranium was not the first time the AEC became concerned that its safeguard rules were lax...
...A secret study called the "Labowitz report" was commissioned to see if there were any gaps in the nation's safeguards system...
...Ever since the initial discovery, the agency had been prodded in its investigations by Congress’ Joint Committee on Atomic Energy-and even with the .money settlement the staff members on the committee weren’t satisfied...
...But for the AEC, the search for the missing uranium wasn’t over yet...
...Documents released recently by the Department of Energy show that by 1961 NUMEC had come to be regarded as a serious security risk...
...Shapiro found he had some explaining to do...
...And the answer, at least from what the CIA could see, was that the bombJohn J. Fialka is a reporrerfbr The Washington Star...
...But while everyone expressed outrage over the disclosure, no one other than Israel denied it...
...Answer: Yes, there is no method presently in existence to protect against overshipment by collusion...
...One of these was an arrangement with Israel under which NUMEC agreed to serve as a “technical consultant and training and procurement agency,” which later gave b i r t h t o I S O R A D , a NUMEC subsidiary half-owned by the Israeli government...
...At the very least, the absence of records that could trace losses to a particular process or to a specific contract meant that Shapiro was operating what was, in effect, an honor system...
...Conran began raising the issue with his superiors...
...It’s not the sort of thing you rush to make public...
...The largest t e c h n o l o g i c a l stumbling block encountered during the Manhattan Project, which developed the bomb during World War 11, was separating an exotic isotope-U-235, so-called highly enriched uranium-from n a t u r a l u r a n i u m . The problem eventually was solved by investing over $1 billion in a mile-long building at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where the uranium was transformed into a gas called uranium hexaflouride and pumped through millions of tiny screens that concentrated the lighter isotope, U-235...
...Russia, the United Kingdom, France, and China used this or similarly complex technological processes to arrive at highly enriched uranium or plutonium...
...And no one, publicly at least, took it upon himself to explain or speculate upon how a tiny country in the Middle East had obtained what was commonly believed to be the most t i g h t l y guarded substance in the world...
...Asked about the report, Dr...
...As some of the NRC commissioners recalled the briefing, Duckett’s hands were shaking as he produced a file on the conference table...
...Shapiro quickly gained a reputation in the nuclear industry as a hustler, competing furiously for government contracts and taking on some of the more exotic, risk-filled jobs that other companies rejected...
...If the file concerned NUMEC, then Conran guessed it was probably important, because he knew that the company’s c h r o n i c security problems had triggered the nation’s first major overhaul of the rules covering the growing traffic in SNM...
...The end of the often-heated dialogue came on April 30, 1965, when the fears of the inspectors suddenly became much more concrete...
...By the end of the meeting, Shapiro caved in...
...The report concluded that indeed there were, since the only restriction that was regularly enforced was the requirement that a company pay for all materials lost during processing...
...The company’s liability for lost uranium was less under the government contracts, and, sure enough, the heaviest losses were showing up in the government’s column...
...A showdown occurred, on September 24, 1965, in a meeting i n Washington between Shapiro and Brown, who brought along ten of his staff members...
...From what he saw of the case, though, Dr...
...To prove his point, Shapiro ordered his employees to begin exhuming items from the 1962 pit...
...At first it appeared the loss was 134 pounds, enough to make roughly six atomic bombs...
...Don’t tell anyone else, not even Dean Rusk [then Secretary of State] and Robert McNamara [then Secretary of Defense],” Johnson allegedly instructed Helms...
...According to more recent estimates made by the CIA, the initial source of the Israeli nuclear weapons capability is now a moot question, at least in strategic terms, because Israel has since built up a sizeable stockpile of plutonium using a French-made reactor operating at Dimona.* In another sense, however, the NUMEC story raises what may be the scariest possibility in the whole scary a r e a of SNM s a f e g u a r d s : t h e possibility that if something happens to nuclear materials that is profoundly embarrassing to the state, it will be selfconcealing...
...At one point in 1962, the agency’s New York office suspected that Shapiro was intentionally blurring the distinction between government-owned metal and metal held under private contracts...
...There was a noticeable tendency both at certain staff levels and among contractors to conclude that as long as material was paid for, all responsibility toward it had been fulfilled...
...Both made frequent visits to the plant...
...Shortly afterwards, NUMEC, the company that had hoped to ,become “the du Pont of the atomic fuel industry,” was dissolved...
...The prime suspect was a private company, the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corp...
...There was no question, then, that the NUMEC material was very sensitive...
...Glenn T. Seaborg, then the chairman of the AEC, attempted to close the matter by telling the Joint Committee that he was “satisfied” that the missing material had been lost in NU M EC’s waste processes over the years...
...There is no reason why we can’t eventually become the du Pont of the atomic fuel industry,” he once told a New York Times reporter...
...This second team also returned without finding any direct evidence of a diversion, but its findings still were not altogether comforting...
...Between 1957 and 1965 NUMEC shipped half a ton of U235 to authorized overseas clients, primarily I t a l y , Japan, France, Germany, and the Netherlands...
...We’re not afraid of size or growth...
...But lsrael was different...
...Because of the state of NUMEC’s records, the inspectors were not even able to pinpoint when the major losses might have taken place...
...There were still nagging questions they wanted answered: What did the records say about NUMEC’s dealing with overseas clients...
...had come to suspect that Israel had a nuclear weapons capability...
...His boss, Dr...
...At the time, Hoover was only allowed 40 taps for national security purposes and the Nixon administration had other pressing uses for them...
...A small part of the Duckett account was later mistakenly released by the NRC...
...There was another problemaccording to recently declassified documents, the AEC became concerned about several of Shapiro’s overseas relationships that went well beyond normal supply c o n t r a c t arrangements...
...grade metal had come from the U.S...
...officials despite repeated inquiries by three of the nation’s top investigative agencies-the CIA, the FBI, and the General Accounting Office...
...Interviews with a number of investigators and former figures in the case indicate that there are at least four working theories about what might have happened...
...N UM EC’s a n n u a l financial statements said the company’s mission was to develop machinery to preserve strawberries and citrus fruits through irradiation...
...Actually, it was a bit more than business as usual...
...In a proxy statement, the company explained that in 1966 NUMEC’s net worth and working capital “were reduced below the levels required i n v a r i o u s agreements with lenders, and a condition of technical default arose...
...Once the Israeli capability had been established, the question became: which of the five nations that then enjoyed club status was the source of the Israeli material...
...Not in The Top 40 The old NUMEC was gone but not forgotten...
...But in the never-never world of Washington’s intelligence community, what is regarded as sensitive in one forum may not be treated as sensitive before another...
...only a month after Duckett’s briefing at the NRC, word of Israel’s bomb capability leaked out...
...After factoring in reasonable estimates for all possible ways in which material could have been lost or wasted in various plant processes, the inspection team concluded that the loss of 206 pounds could not be explained, including the missing uranium from the Westinghouse contract...
...NUMEC “did not have positive c o n t r o l s for its alien employees,” and a more rigorous set of AEC inspections was proposed for the following year...
...In fact, the eleven NRC officials at the briefing had been so awed by the secrecy surrounding the file that they did not even ask to see it...
...Because of these and other strange footprints that remained along the path of the NUMECcase, by mid-1978 three congressional subcommittees, the FBI, and the GAO were going back through the old files and interviewing some of the old players...
...NUMEC’s sloppiness generated a small mountain of classified correspondence within the AEC...
...In the subsequent meeting with Johnson, Helms was told in no uncertain terms to drop the matter...
...The customer could then dispose of the the excess amount as it pleased, perhaps reshipping it to a third party...
...The report concluded that, despite the missing documents, there were enough internal controls over the plant’s overseas ship men t s that , “when pro per I y implemented, should, in the absence of deliberate collusion, ensure that the q u a n t i t i e s reported on transfer documents were those quantities shipped...
...None of this high-level concern was much help to Conran o r o t h e r safeguards experts at the NRC...
...Among o t h e r things, the panel required for the first time government inspection of the quantity and quality of bomb-grade metals shipped for export, and called for a range of p e n a l t i e s less severe t h a n life imprisonment or death for certain infractions...
...The answer was probably yes...
...In 1967 a panel of the nation’s top safeguards experts ordered an overhaul of the entire system protecting strategic materials...
...Admiral Hyman Rickover bestowed -his lucrative nuclear fuel contracts on the firm...
...Then the question was whether you could do anything about it, and the answer was no...
...In the course of his research, Conran discovered that there was one file so secret that the other half of the old AEC, t h e Energy Research and Development Administration, refused to admit knowledge of it...
...Israel, he said, “has ten to 20 nuclear weapons ready and available for use...
...The guests were 150 members of the American lnstitute of Aeronautics and Astronautics...
...1 came pretty close to taking a job with him...
...The leaker was none other than Duckett himself...
...The NUMEC story is one of the more bizarre mysteries of the nuclear age, a tale that continues to baffle U.S...
...What troubled the AEC even more was that the plant’s bookkeeping had gone out of c o n t r o l . Although NUMEC’s contracts with the government specified that none of the government-owned highly enriched uranium at the plant could be mixed with uranium from other contracts, Shapiro had been mixing the metal from different contracts “as a matter of policy...
...The evidence included a type of bombing run being practiced by pilots of Israel’s A-4 jets...
...In 1968, after obtaining scientific proof that the Israelis were working with highly enriched uranium at a facility near Dimona in the Negev desert, Helms went to J. Edgar Hoover and asked him to put Shapiro under FBI surveillance...
...Uranium in the Pits Throughout this period, Shapiro often took the offensive against AEC inspectors, arguing that new security measures implemented at the plant would eliminate all future problems and that any further interference with NUMEC’s normal operations would amount to discrimination against a small businessman trying to compete with major companies...
...And so, during the spring of 1966, even as a still-dissatisfied Joint Committee was dispatching a team from the General Accounting Office to see if they could do any better at NUMEC, the AEC went back to business as usual with Shapiro...
...James Connors, Ford’s staff secretary, was led to the conclusion that the trail had become terribly cold...
...Church called Duckett’s remark “the biggest goof in the history of leaks that I have ever seen...
...Ralph Lumb, a chemist who headed the panel, said, “1 believe the panel was established as the result of the experience at NUMEC...
...NUMEC, he claimed, had simply u n d e r e s t i m a t e d the amount of uranium filings, uranium oxide particles, and other fragments of the precious metal that could have been recovered from the filters, discarded machinery, workers’ clothing, and other articles that had gone into the pits...
...So Shapiro shifted his ground slightly, arguing that most of it was really in the 1963 pit...
...When Shapiro first set up shop, everyone seemed to want to be kind to NUMEC...
...Where was NUMEC getting the money to pay the AEC’s enormous bill (after all, the company’s economic fortunes had turned sharply downward...
...Of all those who have secretly worried over the strange and fogshrouded anatomy of Shapiro’s ventuce, perhaps Connor put it best: “I think that what you have here is one of those evergreen stories...
...The company had been formed in 1957 by Shapiro and a group of other former government scientists to capitalize on the Atoms for Peace program...
...Two months later, the NRC got that briefing, from Carl Duckett, then the CIA’S deputy director for science and technology and one of the government’s official keepers of the NUMEC secrets...
...The first big scare came on October 16, 1964, when a nuclear fireball blossomed on a Mongolian desert, announcing that China had become the fifth member of the nuclear club...
...It happened during an evening of many cocktails and a lavish buffet-an event staged by the CIA at its Langley, Virginia headquarters, as part of its new “public relations” program...
...Under this theory, the entire U.S...
...Their suspicion was that the nation’s most vital safeguards system had been penetrdted by one of our closest allies...
...It was, as one highly placed source later described it, “like dealing with the fact that your sister has been raped by a dear friend...
...The 1968 FBI investigation was hindered, according to agency reports to the Hill, by Shapiro’s use of an “encoded phone,” a device in an Israeli embassy office in New York City...
...The FBI has told several congressional investigators working on the case that its surveillance showed that in 1968 Shapiro traveled throughout the U.S...
...In other words, a U.S...
...So Brown dispatched a second survey team to Apollo on March 1, 1966...
...22 pounds of the metal, a chunk about the size of a cantaloupe, would have been worth a b o u t $100,000...
...Were there any employees at NUMEC who might know about a diversion...
...And the fourth theory is that nothing happened...
...Its assignment was to interview past and present NU M EC employees and audit all the company’s exports of bomb-grade metal...
...The source of the natural or unenriched uranium fuel needed for this reactor was also a mystery until European authorities discovered that Mossad, the Israeli equivalent of the CIA, was involved in the bizarre disappearance of 200 tons of processed uranium ore from a Liberian ship, the Scheersberg, in November 1968...
...It’s healthy...
...After he did, President Ford promptly ordered the FBI to begin a new investigation of NUMEC’s activities during the mid1960s...
...Indeed, the FBI discovered that very little formal investigation had been done during the 1968 FBI probe...
...The Atomic Energy Act, he complains, offered him no middle ground-it provided the death penalty for anyone who violated AEC regulations “with the intent to secure an advantage to any foreign nation...
...The CIA also had not forgotten the losses at NUMEC...
...George Bush, the ClA’s new director, was fuming...
...That was one way to do it...
...Because of U-235’s peculiar qualities and the enormously expensive and complex processes required to make it, accurate accounting of its use is at once a matter of great strategic and financial importance...
...safeguard system, such as it was, was finessed by one of our closest allies...
...Throughout the 1960s, a steady stream of foreign scientists and technicians visited NUMEC...
...The AEC auditors found that of the 32 contracts NU M EC had with foreign customers, the records of 26 “were incomplete, inaccurate, or missing...
...NUMEC was due to complete a contract for Westinghouse, which had sent NUMEC a large amount of U-235 fuel for a nuclearpowered rocket then being considered for the nation’s space program...
...procedures might lack credibility," was the way the problem was later presented to a meeting of AEC executives...
...The company, the statement added, had no alternative but to arrange for a merger with a major oil company, Atlantic-Richfield...
...Some of the FBI agents who had worked on the case had been warned never to mention its name, not even in the FBI office...
Vol. 10 • January 1979 • No. 10
