Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad

by Gordon Thomas

  At one level, the native New Yorker was the most important Jewish fund-raiser for the Democratic Party. Feinberg made no secret of why he had raised many millions: every dollar was to ensure the party backed Israel in Congress. He had also discreetly provided many more additional millions of dollars to create Dimona. The money came in cashier’s checks to the Bank of Israel in Tel Aviv, thus avoiding the accountability of the Israeli foreign exchange controls. Ben-Gurion told Feinberg to “sort out the boy. Make the putz understand the reality of life.”

  Feinberg’s method was straightforward political pressure—the kind that had already infuriated Kennedy when he was running for office. Then, Feinberg had bluntly told him: “We are willing to pay your bills if you will let us have control of your Middle East policy.” Kennedy had promised to “give Israel every possible break.” Feinberg had agreed to provide an initial campaign contribution of five hundred thousand dollars—“with more to come.”

  Now he used the same direct approach: if President Kennedy continued to insist on an inspection of Dimona, he should “not count on Jewish financial support in the next political election.” Powerful support came from an unexpected source. Kennedy’s secretary of state, Robert S. McNamara, told Kennedy he could “understand why Israel wants a nuclear bomb.”

  Nevertheless, Kennedy was resolute and Israel was forced to accept an inspection. The president did at the last minute grant two concessions. In return for access to Dimona, the United States would sell Israel Hawk surface-to-air missiles, then the most advanced defensive weapon in the world. And the inspection need not be carried out by the International Atomic Energy Agency, but by an American-only team—that would have to schedule its visit weeks in advance.

  Rafi Eitan relished the detailed account of how the Israelis had duped the American inspectors.

  A bogus control center was built over the real one at Dimona, complete with fake control panels and computer-lined gauges that gave a credible impression of measuring the output of a reactor engaged in an irrigation scheme to turn the Negev into lush pastureland. The area containing the “heavy” water smuggled from France and Norway was placed off-limits to the inspectors “for safety reasons.” The sheer volume of heavy water would have been proof the reactor was being readied for a very different purpose.

  When the Americans arrived, the Israelis were relieved to discover not one spoke Hebrew. It further lessened any possibility of the inspectors uncovering the true intention for Dimona.

  The stage was set for Rafi Eitan.

  Gaining access to the Numec plant was relatively easy. Israel’s embassy in Washington requested permission from the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission “for a team of our scientists to visit the facility to better understand the concerns expressed by your inspectors on the reprocessing of nuclear waste.” The request was granted, even though the FBI was now running a full-scale surveillance operation to discover whether Shapiro had been recruited as an Israeli spy.

  He had not—and never would be. Rafi Eitan was satisfied that Shapiro was a genuine patriot, a Zionist who believed in the right of Israel to defend itself. Not only was Shapiro privately wealthy from family money and shrewd stock-market investments, his personal fortune had rapidly increased from the very large profits Numec had already made. Equally, unlike Jonathan Pollard, Shapiro was not a traitor; his love of America was manifest. Rafi Eitan knew that to even attempt to recruit him would be counterproductive. Shapiro would have to remain outside the operation beginning to crystallize in Rafi Eitan’s mind.

  Nevertheless, some risks were unavoidable. To learn more about Numec, Rafi Eitan had sent two LAKAM operatives to Apollo. They were Avraham Hermoni, whose diplomatic cover at the Israeli embassy in Washington was “scientific counselor,” and Jeryham Kafkafi, a katsa operating in the United States as a freelance science writer.

  Both agents toured the reprocessing plant but were not allowed to photograph it. Shapiro pointed out that would be a breach of Atomic Energy Commission regulations. They had found Shapiro welcoming but, in Hermoni’s judgment, “a man run off his feet.”

  Rafi Eitan decided the time had come for him to go to Apollo. He put together a group of “inspectors.” These included two scientists from Dimona with specialized knowledge of reprocessing nuclear waste. Another team member was listed as a director of the “Department of Electronics, University of Tel Aviv, Israel.” There was no such post at the campus; the man was a LAKAM security officer whose task would be to try to discover a way of stealing fissionable waste from the plant. Hermoni was included: his job would be to point out the areas of poor security he had discovered during his previous visit. Rafi Eitan was traveling under his own name as a “scientific adviser to the office of the Prime Minister of Israel.”

  The delegates were approved by the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv and visas were granted. Rafi Eitan had warned the team they could expect to be under FBI surveillance from the time they landed in New York. But, to his surprise, his experienced eyes saw no evidence of that.

  The Israelis’ arrival in Apollo coincided with Shapiro’s return from another brainstorming tour of American university campuses, where he had been soliciting scientists who were “friendly” to Israel and would agree to go there and “solve its technical and scientific problems.” He would underwrite all their expenses and make up any deficit in their salaries.

  Rafi Eitan and his team’s stay in Apollo was low-key. They took rooms in a motel and spent most of their time at the Numec plant learning the intricacies of converting highly enriched uranium from gaseous uranium hexafluoride. Shapiro explained that Atomic Energy Commission rules meant that Numec would have to pay penalties for any enriched material not accounted for, scaled at $10 a gram, $4,500 a pound.

  Rafi Eitan and his spies left Apollo as quietly as they had come.

  What followed can only be deduced from FBI reports, and even they leave tantalizing questions as to how much Salman Shapiro may have suspected was behind Rafi Eitan’s visit. An FBI report stated that a month after the Israelis had returned home, Numec became a partner with the Israeli government in a business involving what was described as “the pasteurization of food and the sterilization of medical samples by irradiation.”

  Another FBI report complained that “with a warning notice posted on each container that it contained radioactive material, no one would open or examine them—and no one was prepared to let us do so.”

  The reason for the refusal was because the Israeli embassy in Washington had made it clear to the State Department that if any attempt was made to inspect the containers, they would place them under diplomatic immunity. The State Department called the Justice Department and warned of the serious diplomatic consequences that would follow any breach of that immunity. All the thwarted FBI agents could do was watch the containers being loaded on to El Al cargo planes at Idlewild Airport.

  Despite his best efforts, the CIA station chief in Tel Aviv, John Hadden, said he was unable to “firm up” that the containers were ending up in Dimona. The FBI logged nine shipments in the six months following Rafi Eitan’s visit. They noted that the containers arrived at dusk and left before dawn: all were sheathed with lead, needed to transport enriched uranium, and each container was stamped with a pre-addressed stencil in Hebrew giving Haifa as the final destination. On several occasions, agents saw “stovepipes”—storage containers for enriched uranium—being placed in steel cabinets at the Numec loading dock. Each stovepipe bore a number showing it had come from the company’s high-security vaults. But there was still nothing the FBI could do. An FBI memo spoke of “political pressure from State [Department] not to create a diplomatic incident.”

  After ten months the shipments abruptly stopped. The FBI could only assume that sufficient quantities of fissionable material had by then reached Dimona. During the agency’s subsequent interviews, Shapiro denied he had supplied Israel with nuclear bomb-making material. The FBI said their check of company records showed there was a discrepancy i
n the amount of material reprocessed. Shapiro insisted the “most logical explanation” for any “lost” uranium was that it had seeped into the ground or had been “disposed of into the air.” All told, the missing material amounted to one hundred pounds. Shapiro was never charged with any crime.

  In the years that followed, Rafi Eitan could be forgiven for thinking how easy it had become to steal fissionable materials after the collapse of the Soviet Union. An incident that took place at Sheremeteyevo Airport in Moscow on August 10, 1994, proved exactly that.

  At 12:45 P.M. on that day, Justiano Torres, somberly dressed in a gray business suit bought for this one journey, arrived deliberately late for Lufthansa Flight 3369 to Munich. Physically strong, he still sweated a little under the weight of the new black-leather Delsey suitcase. Torres produced his first-class ticket and smiled at the desk clerk. The smile was captured on a camera secretly installed behind the desk to record his every movement.

  Other cameras had secretly filmed him over these past months. Captured on film were his meetings with a disaffected Russian nuclear scientist, Igor Tashanka: their encounters out in the Stalin Hills; their trips on a pleasure steamer on the Moscow River; their dinners at Russian mafia-controlled restaurants; and finally, the meeting where Tashanka passed over the suitcase and in return received an envelope containing $5,000. In every sense, Torres could believe he had struck a wonderful bargain. The suitcase contained fissionable material.

  Justiano Torres was a courier for a Colombian drug cartel who had expanded into trafficking in an even deadlier substance. The suitcase contained, in sealed containers, the two hundred grams of plutonium 239 that Tashanka had sold him. It had a street value of $50 million. The plutonium was so lethal that even coming in contact with a microscopic speck would be fatal. The contents of the suitcase were sufficient to make a small nuclear device.

  For Uri Saguy, the former head of Israeli military intelligence, the prospect was “every thinking person’s nightmare: a bunch of terrorists with their hands on enough fissionable material to devastate Tel Aviv or any other city. In day-to-day intelligence tasking, dealing with a nuclear threat ranks right at the very top.”

  The Israeli intelligence community had long known that terrorists could manufacture a crude nuclear bomb. An American physics graduate student in the 1970s had carried out and described each one of the processes required. His published work caused huge consternation with Mossad.

  Doomsday scenarios were postulated. A bomb could arrive in pieces on board a ship, or be smuggled across a land border and assembled in Israel. The weapon would be detonated by remote control unless impossible demands were met. Would the government stand firm? Mossad’s analysts decided that there would be no surrender. This expectation was based on a deep understanding of the terrorist mind at the time: in the 1970s even extreme groups would hesitate to detonate a nuclear bomb because of the political price they would pay. They would become outcasts to even those nations that covertly supported them.

  The collapse of Soviet Communism had renewed Mossad’s fears. An arena of new uncertainties had been created; no one could say for certain how the new political dimensions within Russia would develop. Already Mossad had discovered Soviet Scud missiles had been exported for hard currency to several Middle East countries. Soviet technicians had helped Algeria build a nuclear reactor. Russia had a large stockpile of biological weapons, including a super-plague germ that could kill millions of people. Supposing even a small portion of it fell into the hands of terrorists? Even a small jar filled with the bug could decimate Tel Aviv. But above all it was the fear Russia would sell off its nuclear arsenal that was the pressing concern. For Uri Saguy that was a threat “no one could ignore.”

  Mossad psychologists drew up psycho-profiles of Russian scientists likely to provide materials and their motives: there were those who would do it purely for cash, others for complex ideological reasons. The list of Soviet facilities from which materials could be stolen was dauntingly large. Mossad’s director general, Shabtai Shavit, sent two katsas to Moscow with special orders to infiltrate the scientific community.

  One of them was Lila. Born of Jewish parents in Beirut, she had a degree in physics from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and worked in Mossad’s scientific intelligence section. She had witnessed the tentative meetings Torres had with Tashanka and how the deal making progressed.

  Lila and her colleague had worked closely with Mossad agents in Germany and elsewhere. The trail had led her to Colombia and back into the Middle East. Other Mossad operatives had observed meetings in Cairo, Damascus, and Baghdad. New leads had opened up: Bosnia appeared to be a possible route for smuggling the plutonium 239 to its final destination—Iraq. But, not for the first time, knowing and proving the complicity of the Saddam regime were difficult.

  That was why Torres was being allowed to fly on an unsuspecting commercial airliner with a lethal cargo. The decision to do so had been carefully weighed by the heads of Russian and German intelligence. They had concluded that the risk of the plutonium detonating was “infinitesimal.” Permission for Torres to travel had been given by both their respective governments to see if Torres would lead them to the end user for the material. Israel had not been consulted on the matter. The operation was officially only a German-Russian one. In the past, Mossad, on more than one occasion, had been a silent partner where other agencies had claimed the credit.

  From her vantage point overlooking the airport departure gates on that August morning, “Lila” knew her role in this case was over. A Mossad agent—code-named Adler—was already positioned in the lobby of the Excelsior Hotel in midtown Munich, where Torres was to make his handover. Another agent—Mort—was at the Munich airport awaiting the arrival of Flight 3369.

  A third agent—“Ib”—sat two seats back from Torres as the plane headed west on its three-hour flight. Across the aisle from Torres sat Viktor Sidorenko, Russian deputy minister for atomic energy. His responsibilities included protecting his country’s nuclear arsenal. Russia now had around 130 tons of weapons-grade plutonium, enough to make sixteen thousand atom bombs, each twice the size of the one that destroyed Hiroshima.

  Sidorenko had received a number of disturbing reports that detailed lax controls and low morale among the staff of hundreds of Russian institutes and research centers with access to radioactive substances. A few months before, a worker at a nuclear plant in the Urals had been arrested with radioactive uranium pellets in a plastic bag. Over five kilos of uranium had been squirreled away by workmen at another plant near Minsk and hidden in their homes. The thefts had only come to light when a kilo was sold for twenty bottles of vodka. Sidorenko was traveling to Germany to assure Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s government that cases like this would never happen again; the Germans were threatening sanctions.

  At 5:45 P.M., exactly on time, Flight 3369 landed at Munich’s Franz Josef Strauss Airport and taxied to its terminal C stand. Minister Sidorenko was the first to deplane. He was whisked away by a waiting car and driven to a high-security area. There he was told that Tashanka had just been arrested in Moscow.

  Torres entered the arrivals area. The presence of heavily armed German police would not have surprised him. Munich had always made a show of its security after the Olympic Games massacre of Israeli athletes. Torres made a telephone call to the Excelsior Hotel, and was connected to room 23. Waiting there was a Spaniard, Javier Arratibel, whose passport described him as an “industrialist.” In fact, he was the broker for the plutonium. He called a man he knew only as Julio-O.

  The calls had been monitored by German intelligence officers. As Torres strolled to the luggage carousel to collect his suitcase, he was observed from a nearby office by Munich police superintendent Wolfgang Stoephasios and the senior intelligence officer.

  Torres picked up his suitcase and walked toward the Nothing to Declare exit. Ib and Mort followed. They could do no more. They had no power of arrest here. Stoephasios emerged from his office. It was t
he signal for action.

  In moments Torres was surrounded and bundled away. The suitcase was taken to a room. Inside waited a white-suited figure with a Geiger counter. With him were bomb-disposal experts. They used a portable X-ray machine to see if the case was wired with explosives. It was not. Neither was there a telltale clicking from the Geiger to indicate a leak of fissionable material. The suitcase was opened. Inside, wrapped in heavy plastic, were the containers of plutonium 239. They were removed and placed in bomb-blast boxes and carried to a waiting armored truck. From there they were taken to Germany’s atomic energy complex.

  In the Excelsior Hotel, Arratibel was arrested. But the next link in the chain, Julio-O, had slipped across the border into Hungary. The Hungarian police said they would look for him. But no one was holding his breath in Munich. Hungary was known to be one of the entry points to the West for Russian smugglers.

  The Mossad men informed Tel Aviv what had happened.

  In Tel Aviv, Mossad’s director general, Shabtai Shavit, saw the outcome as another small victory in the endless battle against nuclear terrorism. But he was not alone in wondering how many other suitcases had slipped through, how soon before there would be a nuclear explosion unless impossible demands were met.

  A few miles away from where Shavit pondered such questions, Rafi Eitan, the man who had masterminded what the FBI and CIA still believed had been the theft of nuclear material from the Numec reprocessing plant at Apollo, continued to spend his free time carving yet more sculptures from scrap materials. Outwardly he was at peace with the world. Both the Pollard and Apollo operations had faded from memory; when pressed, he said he could not recall the first names of either Pollard or Shapiro. LAKAM had officially been closed down. Rafi Eitan insisted that his work nowadays was very different from what he had done before: he was a director of a small shipping company in Havana where he also had an interest in a company manufacturing agricultural pesticides. He claimed a close relationship with Fidel Castro, “which probably does not please the Americans.” He had never set foot in the United States since his trip to Apollo. He said he had no desire to, not least because he suspected he might still be asked “a lot of questions” about Jonathan Pollard and what exactly had happened following his visit to Apollo.