This is an excerpt from the book “The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton” by Jefferson Morley, which discusses in detail how Israel managed to steal fissile material from the US and how top officials in the US intelligence appartus turned a blind eye to this heist.
“ANGLETON’S LOYALTY TO ISRAEL betrayed U.S. policy on an epic scale, and his former colleague John Hadden knew it. In 1978, Hadden, the retired Tel Aviv station chief, made the long trip from his home in Brunswick, Maine, to Washington, D.C. He had a story he needed to tell the right people: how Israel stole nuclear material from the United States government on Angleton’s watch. The story of the great uranium heist at the NUMEC plant in Pennsylvania continued to attract official interest. Over the years, the story of the loss of hundreds of pounds of fissionable material from the Apollo facility had been examined by several government agencies. The question was whether the Israelis had used NUMEC to divert enriched uranium to Dimona and then used it to build their nuclear arsenal. The CIA’s scientists reviewed the evidence. Without judging the legal questions, they all agreed that enriched uranium from NUMEC had been obtained by the Israelis. “I believe that all of my senior analysts who worked on the problem agreed with me fully,” said Carl Duckett, deputy director of the CIA responsible for technical and nuclear intelligence. “[T]he clear consensus in the CIA was that indeed NUMEC material had been diverted and had been used by the Israelis in fabricating weapons.”138
The Department of Energy and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission looked into the matter and found their efforts stymied by a lack of cooperation from the CIA and from NUMEC president Zalman Shapiro, as well as by a studious lack of interest from Capitol Hill. The investigators found no proof of diversion, but they did not have access to all the classified information available to the CIA scientists. When former NRC staffer Roger Mattson managed to get access to the CIA records, he concluded that NUMEC was the only possible source of Israel’s fissionable material.139
John Hadden said the same thing. “A crime was committed 10 or 20 years ago,” he wrote in a memo for the record, “a crime considered so serious that for its commission the death penalty is mandatory and no statute of limitations applies.” A good CIA man, Hadden never spilled classified information, never reported out of channels. He spoke only with the senior staff of the AEC or the House Interior Committee.140 He prepared twenty-nine talking points to support his memo’s conclusion: that NUMEC was a front company deployed in an Israeli-American criminal conspiracy to evade U.S. nonproliferation laws and supply the Israeli nuclear arsenal. “If the crime had been committed intentionally and was not the result of carelessness,” Hadden went on, “then the circumstances warranted a finding of high treason with a mandatory death penalty.” The only other explanation, he wrote, was “gross incompetence on the part of those responsible for security in certain areas.” It was either treason or incompetence, Hadden said. If one of those terms applied to his former boss, Jim Angleton, so be it.141
Angleton had regular professional and personal contact with at least six men aware of Israel’s secret plan to build a bomb. From Asher Ben-Natan to Amos de Shalit to Isser Harel to Meir Amit to Moshe Dayan to Yval Ne’eman, his friends were involved in the building of Israel’s nuclear arsenal. If he learned anything of the secret program at Dimona, he reported very little of it. If he didn’t ask questions about Israel’s actions, he wasn’t doing his job. Instead of supporting U.S. nuclear security policy, he ignored it. Angleton thought collaboration with the Israeli intelligence services was more important. And the results proved his point, he believed. When Angleton started as chief of the Counterintelligence Staff in 1954, the state of Israel and its leaders were regarded warily in Washington, especially at the State Department. When Angleton left government service twenty years later, Israel held twice as much territory as it had in 1948, the CIA and the Mossad collaborated on a daily basis, and the governments of the United States and Israel were strategic allies, knit together by expansive intelligence sharing, multibillion-dollar arms contracts, and coordinated diplomacy. The failure of the U.S. nonproliferation policy to prevent the introduction of nuclear weapons to the Middle East in the 1960s is part of Angleton’s legacy, and its effects will be felt for decades, if not centuries. He was a leading architect of America’s strategic relationship with Israel that endures and dominates the region to this day. He was, as his friend Meir Amit said, “the biggest Zionist of the lot.””
138. Transcript of “Near Armageddon: The Spread of Nuclear Weapons in the Middle East,” 14, ABC News Closeup, broadcast April 28, 1981. See also “Only CIA Believed Uranium Diverted,” Washington Post, February 26, 1978.
139. Author’s interview with Roger Mattson, December 10, 2015.
140. One of them was investigator Peter Stockton, who said Hadden had showed him “a binder of stuff” when they met at a CIA safe house. “He would pull out a 25 foot makeshift scroll of paper that contained the case against NUMEC,” Stockton told a reporter. “This was before computers, and the thing was long and pasted together and that was his evidence. We’d sit there in the safe house and he’d read me portions.” See Scott Johnson, “What Lies Beneath,” Foreign Policy, March 23, 2015.
141. When the NUMEC investigation petered out in the late 1970s, Hadden let the matter drop. He was intelligence officer, not a crusader. He had done what he could as a CIA officer and a citizen. He filed his findings about NUMEC among his personal papers, where his son found them after his death in 2013.
Fiqh ud deen 