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THE SAMSON OPTION: ISRAEL'S NUCLEAR ARSENAL AND AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY |
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Chapter 5: Internal Wars Israel's nuclear bomb project was besieged with enemies- from within and without-in its early history. The vast majority of those senior officials who knew what was going on at Dimona thought it folly to waste such prodigious amounts of money on a doomsday weapon that might or might not work when conventional weapons such as tanks, guns, and aircraft were desperately needed. The concept of underdeveloped and underfinanced Israel as a superpower seemed ludicrous. By the early 1960s, Dimona, with its huge manpower needs, had hired many of the most skilled Israeli scientists and technicians away from local research and manufacturing companies, resulting in a much-criticized slowdown in the growth of the nation's industrial base. There also were moral objections from a few members of the scientific and academic community, including two of the original members of the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission. By 1957, as construction began on the reactor, four more members of the commission had resigned, essentially because they had nothing to do. The only commission member still on the job was its chairman, Ernst David Bergmann. Bergmann, David Ben-Gurion, and Shimon Peres were waging what amounted to constant war-all in secret-to keep the Israeli bomb project alive. The most threatening problem came from Israel's partner in secrecy-the French. General Charles de Gaulle had won a seven-year term as president of France's newly constituted Fifth Republic in December 1958 by promising to find an acceptable compromise for ending the war in Algeria. The war, which de Gaulle continued to prosecute, had sharply divided the nation, as the Vietnam War would later divide the United States; all other issues, such as the question of continued support for Israel, seemed secondary. De Gaulle was known to be emphatically in favor of an independent nuclear deterrent for France, but it was not known how he might react to the profound French commitment to Dimona. It was a worrisome matter for those members of the French Atomic Energy Commission who supported the Israeli bomb, and they handled the issue in the time-honored way of the bureaucracy: they did not tell de Gaulle what was going on. Contracts had been signed and money paid, and the work was proceeding at Dimona. *** The French on the job at Dimona were also a source of turmoil. Hundreds of French engineers and technicians had begun pouring into the Negev in 1957, and Beersheba bustled with construction as new apartment complexes and residential units were thrown together. Housing also was made available to the thousands of North African Jews (or Sephardim) who emigrated from Morocco and Algeria, hired to do the digging and building of the reactor and reprocessing plant. European Jews were slowly and carefully recruited from government and private businesses throughout Israel to serve as scientists and bureaucratic managers; they, too, were provided with housing in Beersheba. There was a caste system in the desert, and the French were on top, as they repeatedly made all too clear. "The French were arrogant," said one Israeli who spent part of his career at Dimona. "They thought Jews [in Israel] were inferior. We weren't slick and we didn't dress well -- but we were bright." Some of the French officials were openly anti- emitic, the Israeli recalled, and one--eventually ordered out of Israel-was found to have collaborated with the Nazis during World War II. The French treatment of the Jews from North Africa who had been hired as laborers was even worse, the Israeli added: "They would speak of Jews from Algeria and Morocco like they were stones-inferior beings. It was Nazilike." Even those Frenchmen who were Jewish did little to ease the tension; many considered themselves to be of a different class and social standing than their less sophisticated Israeli colleagues. Ironically, the Algerian and Moroccan Jews also were mistreated by their Israeli employers. One standing rule was that the Moroccans and Algerians would be hired only for fifty-nine days and then dismissed, a strategem that avoided paying any of the many benefits that came with tenure (the Israeli economy was dominated by the labor movement), which was reached after two months on the job. After a few days off, the North African Jewish laborers would be rehired for another fifty-nine days. "Some socialist government," said the Israeli, with a caustic laugh. The North African Jews were "treated like slaves" by French and Israelis alike. By mid-1960, when there were rumors of a possible French pullout, many Israelis couldn't have cared less: they'd had their fill of the French. The Israeli scientists and technicians had absorbed much of the French technical data by then- any plans were modified extensively on the job--and the reaction was, an Israeli recalled, "Go. We'll do it ourselves." Abraham Sourassi, one of the senior Israelis at Dimona-he was responsible for building the reprocessing plant-endeared himself to his countrymen by declaring, "Good riddance," upon hearing of de Gaulle's disenchantment with Dimona. "It was the typical Israeli attitude-just show us," said the former Dimona official. "We'll copy it and do it better." The long hours, hard work, and French smugness did not diminish the excitement of being involved with Israel's most important secret. "We felt great," said one of the first Israelis hired to manage the construction in 1958. "We were pioneers." The official recalled his initial interview with Ernst Bergmann: "He tells me, 'We have a big project and we need the best brains. It's going to be something remarkable that you'll never forget.' " Bergmann also assured the young man that his new job would be good for his career-as good as serving with the Israeli Defense Force: "He said it'd be 'a feather in my cap. It's going to be modern.' So I filled out the forms. Took me three months to go through security." Those Israelis who had been members of the Communist Party (as many had been before immigrating to Israel) and those with relatives in Eastern Europe were barred from employment because of growing Israeli fears of Soviet penetration, fanned to no small degree by the growing antagonism between Moscow and Jerusalem. Israel had been racked by a series of spy scandals by the late 1950s, and the intelligence operatives in the sixty-man Soviet embassy in Tel Aviv were believed to especially target the scientific community. Providing security for the burgeoning nuclear operation was a high priority and led Shimon Peres to insist on the creation of a new intelligence agency, initially known as the Office of Special Tasks. Its director, handpicked by Peres, was a tall, quiet former military intelligence officer named Binyamin Blumberg. The Office of Special Tasks, bureaucratically placed inside the defense ministry, would become one of the most successful intelligence agencies in modern history-and, after Blumberg's resignation more than twenty years later, be responsible for one of Israel's worst mistakes, the recruitment of Jonathan Pollard. Blumberg's sole mission in the late 1950s was protecting Dimona, and he made it a point to be involved in the details. One Israeli responsible for recruiting scientists told of having an excellent prospect rejected by Dimona's security office because of distant relatives in Eastern Europe. He appealed to Blumberg, who had the power to overturn any bureaucratic rule: "I had to beg Blumberg to get him hired. We needed him desperately. He did it-but he said it had to be 'on my life.'" By early 1960, the reactor at Dimona was taking shape, and many Israeli nuclear physicists and technicians were summoned back from France, where they had spent years in training at Saclay and Marcoule. The top scientists were provided with double pay and subsidized seven-room apartments in Beersheba, space unheard of in those years in Israel. Those who stayed long enough eventually were given possession of the apartments, worth at least $50,000, and permitted to sell them at their leisure. As the pace and intensity of construction grew, Beersheba inevitably became an international city. The French presence was palpable, as upward of 2,500 French men, women, and children made their life in the Negev. There were special French schools for the children, and the streets were full of French autos. All of this was duly reported by foreign diplomats and military attaches assigned to various embassies in Tel Aviv. There were constantly recurring rumors of the bomb, but the cover stories-usually revolving around seawater desalinization or agricultural research-somehow held. Ian Smart was a young British diplomat on his first foreign assignment in the late 1950s, as third secretary of his country's small embassy in Tel Aviv. He would go on to become an international expert in nonproliferation, but in those years he was merely curious-and suspicious. "There was a lot of talk by the end of 1960 about Dimona," he recalled years later, "prompted, for one thing, by the sheer progress of the site. It was already very apparent on the skyline. And from the road you could see the cooling tower base of the [reactor] dome and the beginning of the rib structure. Secondly, there was the French presence in Beersheba. There was an apartment block they used with a lot of Renault Dauphins about-all carrying French registration." The Israeli government, when officially asked about the activities at Dimona, told the British embassy a series of stories. One early claim, recalls Smart, was that the area was a desert grasslands research institute. Smart himself heard a second explanation while driving with a group of Israeli Defense Force troops in the Negev. Smart pointed out the cooling tower and an officer replied, "Ah yes. That's the new manganese-processing plant." Throughout the last year of his stay, Smart adds, "I was reporting the 'suspicion' that this looked like a nuclear reactor. But how do you get more than a suspicion without putting a U-2 over it?" *** The Eisenhower administration, as Smart could not know, was in its third year of V-2 overflights of Dimona by 1960, and expanding its coverage. Art Lundahl, Dino Brugioni, and their colleagues in the V-2 shop at the CIA were now requesting systematic overflights of the French nuclear test site near Reggane, Algeria, in the Sahara. The French had successfully tested their first nuclear bomb in February 1960; it had a yield of more than sixty kilotons, three times larger than the first American test at Los Alamos. And the CIA knew that an Israeli scientific team had been at the test site as observers. There was another concern: Israeli scientists also had been tracked to a nearby French chemical and biological weapons (CBW) testing area in the Sahara. "I wondered," Brugioni recalled, "were the Israelis looking at CBW as a stopgap until they got the bomb? We thought they may have a CBW capability." All of this was immediately shared with the Eisenhower White House, Brugioni said. *** The Israelis and French continued to monitor the U-2 overflights, but they also continued to operate with the most stringent secrecy at Dimona-as if no outsider understood what was going on. French workers at Dimona were forbidden to write directly to relatives and friends in France and elsewhere, but sent mail to a phony post office box in Latin America. Mail from France to Israel was routed the same way. The sophisticated equipment for the reactor and processing plant was assembled by the French Atomic Energy Commission in a clandestine workshop in a Paris suburb and transported by truck, rail, and ship. The heaviest equipment, such as the reactor tank, was described to French customs officials as components of a seawater desalinization plant bound for Latin America. Israel also needed an illicit shipment of heavy water-it was impractical to rely on the heavy-water process invented by the Weizmann Institute, which was too slow-and turned, as did most of the world's nuclear powers, to the Norwegians, who before World War II had invented an electrolysis method for producing large quantities of heavy water. Norway remained among the international leaders in the export of heavy water in the 1950s, and its sales to the French Atomic Energy Commission had only one condition-that the heavy water not be transferred to a third country. That stipulation was ignored as the French Air Force secretly flew as much as four tons of the water-stored in oversized barrels-to Israel sometime in 1960. [1] A French cover firm, the Research Company for Financing and Enterprise, eventually was set up to handle the extensive contacts and negotiations with the Israeli government and various Israeli subcontractors who would actually build Dimona. There was no problem of security among the subcontractors; all contracts were funneled through Peres and his colleagues in Mapai. The largest Israeli engineering company at Dimona, SoleI Bone Ltd., of Haifa, was closely associated with the Mapai Party; Israelis involved in the early stages of construction at Dimona acknowledged that there was an extensive, and traditional, system of diverting contract funds to the party. *** All of this cost money, and the huge expense of Dimona was a constant source of dissent inside the Israeli government, which was in a struggle to match Egypt in the rapid arms buildup in the Middle East. Egypt acquired its first Soviet advanced fighter plane, the MiG-21, in 1960, and Israel continued to purchase the most advanced warplanes available from the French. Both countries obtained bombers from their international pa trons, and both were continuing research into ballistic missile delivery systems. By 1961, however, Egypt's military expenditures had reached nearly $340 million, twice as much as Israel was spending. The perennial critics of Israel's nuclear program, who included Levi Eshkol, the finance minister, and Pinhas Sapir, minister of commerce and industry-the two men dominated the Israeli budget process for more than fifteen years-saw the Egyptian arms buildup as the most compelling argument against investing money at Dimona. Just how much Israel was spending on the bomb in these years is impossible to estimate accurately, and Israel's 1957 contract with the French for the construction at Dimona has never been made public. One rough estimate, published by the Israeli press in December 1960, put the cost of the reactor alone at $130 million. A detailed study of overall nuclear start-up costs was published in 1983 by Thomas W. Graham, a nonproliferation expert and former U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA) official. Graham concluded that France had spent between $10 billion and $15 billion to assemble its secure strike capability, including thermonuclear weapons, with as much as half spent on delivery systems. India similarly would have to invest as much as 10 to 23 percent of its annual defense budget in the nuclear area, Graham wrote, if it were to achieve status as a full-scale nuclear power. Israel's strategic goal was to achieve nothing less than a secure strike capacity, with thermonuclear weapons and missile and aircraft delivery systems capable of reaching targets in the Soviet Union. The cost of those ambitions was heightened by the fact that so much of the facility at Dimona, including its chemical reprocessing plant, was being built underground. The difficulties of working below the surface could only skyrocket the already high costs of ventilation, waste disposal, and worker safety. Other significant cost factors included the obligation to pay workers well in union-dominated Israel, a reliance on foreign nationals such as the French, and the extensive security needed to protect a secret facility. Israel's ultimate commitment undoubtedly amounted to many billions of dollars. Ben-Gurion understood that getting Dimona complete would be possible only if it were not being financed out of the Israeli budget. The solution was to begin secret fund-raising for the bomb abroad. Israel already was receiving, according to American intelligence estimates, hundreds of millions a year in overall gifts and contributions from American Jews alone. Sometime in 1960, Shimon Peres decided to form a special group of trusted and discreet donors that became known, according to Israeli sources, as the Committee of Thirty. Certain wealthy Jews around the world, including Baron Edmund de Rothschild of Paris and Abraham Feinberg of New York, were asked to quietly raise money for what Peres called the "special weapons" program, and they did so. Years later, Peres would brag to an interviewer that "not one penny [for Dimona] came from the government budget. The project was financed from contributions I raised from Jewish millionaires who understood the importance of the issue. We collected forty million dollars." Peres also said that he "brought Jewish millionaires to Dimona. I told them what would be here." Former Israeli government officials confirmed that at least one group of foreign contributors was permitted to visit Dimona in 1968, after its completion. The $40 million raised by Peres would not be nearly enough, however. Israeli officials estimated that by the mid-1960s Israel was spending not scores of millions but hundreds of millions of dollars annually on its nuclear program, with the Peres operation producing a small percentage of the funds and the government underwriting the rest. Ben-Gurion's insistence on continuing to invest that kind of money in the bomb remained a severe source of conflict inside his cabinet and the Mapai Party. There were reasons other than financial for objecting to the bomb. Old-fashioned military men such as Yigal Allon, who had led troops during the War of Independence; Yitzhak Rabin, the army chief of operations who was destined to be chief of staff; and Ariel Sharon, the Israeli general and commando leader, believed that Israel's essential advantage over the Arabs was the quality and training of its military personnel. To these men, nuclear weapons were nothing more than a great equalizer: an Egypt equipped with the bomb was far more dangerous to Israel than an Egypt limited to conventional arms, even in huge quantities. If Israel possessed nuclear weapons, their analysis continued, it would be impossible to deny them to Egypt or other nations in the Middle East. [2] Another compelling argument against Dimona was made by the nation's industrial managers throughout the early 1960s, as the reactor and chemical reprocessing plant-nearing completion- continued to necessitate the recruitment of additional scientists and technicians. Israel was, in essence, facing what amounted to a domestic brain drain. By the late 1960s, senior officials of the ministry of commerce and industry were publicly critical of the reduced level of industrial research in the nation. Government funding for such research had been drastically cut back, and industry was lagging increasingly behind science. Scientific innovations still took place, but there were few engineering companies capable of turning those ideas into profitable goods that manufacturers could put into production. Officials who worked at Dimona in those years acknowledged the predatory hiring practices, with the nation's chemical industry being a prime target. "We raided every place in the country," one former official recalled with pride. "We depleted Israel's industrial system." The only facility off-limits was the small research reactor at Nahal Soreq, near the Weizmann Institute. At its height, the former official said, fifteen hundred Israeli scientists, many with doctorates, worked at Dimona. *** The first overt sign of de Gaulle's unease over France's nuclear commitment to Israel came in May 1960, when Maurice Couve de Murville, the French foreign minister, informed the Israeli ambassador that France wanted Israel to make a public announcement about the reactor at Dimona and also agree to submit it to international inspection, similar to the inspection of Nahal Soreq. Without such acts, Couve de Murville said, France would not supply raw uranium to the reactor. Ben-Gurion decided to fly to France for a summit meeting. The two leaders got along well: de Gaulle would later characterize Ben-Gurion in his memoirs as "one of the greatest statesmen of our time.... From the very first moment, I felt sympathetic admiration for this courageous fighter and champion. His personality symbolized Israel, which he has ruled since the day he presided over her creation and struggle." Ben-Gurion, in turn, found de Gaulle to be a "lively, humane man with a sense of humor, very alert, and much kindness." Bertrand Goldschmidt's personal notes of the meeting, provided to the author, show that de Gaulle, embroiled in Algeria, was worried about the potential for international scandal if France's involvement with Dimona became publicly known. De Gaulle explained, according to the notes, that "if France was the only country to help Israel, while neither the United States, Britain, or the Soviet Union has helped anyone else [get the bomb], she would put herself in an impossible international situation." There was a second worry: "No doubt if Israel had the atomic bomb, Egypt would be receiving one as well." The critical concern for de Gaulle was Dimona's underground chemical reprocessing plant, then being built according to French specifications: he did not want to be responsible for making the Israeli bomb inevitable. French help in building the plant would have to cease. Ben-Gurion gave his view of the Arab threat, but de Gaulle insisted that the Israeli prime minister was "exaggerating the danger of destruction that threatens you. In no way will we allow you to be massacred. . . . We will defend you. We will not let Israel fall." De Gaulle offered to sell Israel more fighter aircraft. De Gaulle came away from his meeting convinced, as he wrote in his memoirs, that he had ordered all work to stop on the reprocessing plant: "I put an end to abusive practices of collaboration established on the military level, after the Suez expedition, between Tel Aviv and Paris, and which introduced Israelis permanently to all levels of staff and French services. Thus in particular there was a stop to the aid provided by us near Beersheba, for a plant to transform uranium into plutonium from which some fine day atom bombs could arise." De Gaulle's order, if issued, was ignored. Saint- Gobain's work on the underground reprocessing plant was delayed for more than two years, but in 1962 a new French contractor arrived and finished the job. Ben-Gurion was pleased with de Gaulle's promises of continued military aid, but he was not willing to trade an Israeli bomb for French warplanes. Over the next few months, Shimon Peres was able to work out a compromise in talks with Couve de Murville that centered on what amounted to an Israeli lie, one that would dominate Israel's public stance on nuclear arms for decades. The Israelis assured France that they had no intention of manufacturing an atomic bomb and would not do any reprocessing of plutonium. A compromise of sorts was reached: French companies would continue to supply the uranium ore and reactor parts that already had been ordered and not demand any foreign inspection. Israel would make public the existence of its nuclear reactor and continue its construction at Dimona without any official French government help. With the friendly summit behind him, Ben-Gurion did nothing to change the status quo at Dimona. Neither did de Gaulle or the French government. The privately owned French construction firms and their employees maintained a vigorous presence at Dimona until 1966 and continued to be well paid under the existing contracts. _______________ Notes: 1. Details of this and many other areas of French cooperation with Israel were initially reported by Pierre Pean, a French journalist, in his richly documented 1982 book Les Deux Bombes (Fayard), which was not published in the United States. The essential facts in Pean's book were verified by the author of this book in subsequent interviews with French and Israeli officials. Those officials raised questions, however, about the motives of some of those who had aided Pean. Many of the French companies, they said, that had been involved in the construction of Dimona in the early 1960s were working under contract for Iraq, with the approval of the French Atomic Energy Commission, at the time of the bombing of Osirak in 1981. It was the subsequent political and economic anger at the Israelis that led a few private and public officials to cooperate fully with Pean and provide him with documentation of the French role at Dimona. 2. Moshe Dayan, as one of the few military men who supported the bomb in these early years, was an anomaly. American nonproliferation experts eventually came to understand that there was a correlation between the attitude of military officers toward the bomb and a national commitment to going nuclear. Many senior military officers in both Israel and India objected bitterly to the nuclear weapons arsenal in its early development. However, once the bomb joined the military arsenal, as it did in India in the late 1970s and in Israel a few years earlier, dissent ceased.
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