Israeli Cover Stories about the Dimona Reactor Dismayed Top Level Officials Who Saw a “Clearly Apparent Lack of Candor”
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Other documents published today detail the discovery of the secret project that some in the U.S. government believed from the very start aimed at a weapons capability; the U.S. debates over Israel's lack of candor; and U.S. government efforts to pressure the Israelis to answer key questions about the nature of the Dimona project.This "discovery," which came as the presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower was drawing to a close, caused apprehension in Washington by raising concern about regional stability and nuclear proliferation, but it also produced annoyance because Israeli officials at all levels repeatedly provided less than credible answers to U.S. questions about Dimona. Thus, in September 1960, when embassy officials asked about a new construction site when they were on a helicopter ride nearby, an adroit Israeli official, Addy Cohen, improvised a story to keep the secret: it was the site of a textile factory, he said; a story that was not wholly false because there was a textile plant near Dimona. An interview with Addy Cohen detailing the episode appears in this posting for the first time.Documents published in this collection shed light on a particularly notable intelligence failure: how Washington missed warning signs that the Israelis had a nuclear project underway, but also how the U.S. belatedly realized what the Israelis were doing, and how Eisenhower and his senior advisers reacted to this discovery. Among the documents are:The June 1959 Israel-Norway secret agreement providing for the sale of Norwegian heavy water to Israel (through the United Kingdom), transmitted by Oslo Embassy political officer Richard Kerry (father of Secretary of State John Kerry).Reports about information from a then-covert source — University of Michigan nuclear engineering professor Henry Gomberg — who learned that the Israelis had a secret nuclear reactor project that involved experiments with plutonium.A telegram from the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv reporting on Finance Ministry official Addy Cohen's statement that "we've been misbehaving," and one by an unidentified official close to Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion that the secrecy surrounding Dimona was unjustifiable and that it was "a stupid mistake on the part of Israel."Reports by U.S. Ambassador Ogden Reid on conversations with Ben-Gurion.A State Department message to the embassy in Tel Aviv conveying irritation that the responses of the Israeli government showed a "lack of candor."Messages about a role for the International Atomic Energy Agency in inspecting and safeguarding Dimona.The Eisenhower Administration and the Discovery of Dimona: March 1958-January 1961This and the three other photographs of the construction site near Dinoma in the Negev desert for Israel's then-secret nuclear reactor were taken during the last months of 1960. In the last months of 1960 as the presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower was coming to a close, the U.S. government discovered that Israel had been building, with French assistance, a secret nuclear reactor near Dimona in the Negev Desert that could give Israel a nuclear weapons potential. The discovery caused apprehension within the Eisenhower administration by invoking concerns about regional stability and nuclear proliferation, but it also produced annoyance because Israeli officials at all levels provided less than credible answers to U.S. questions about Dimona.One episode that helped create a sense of deception was that, in response to initial U.S. official questions about the construction site, the Israelis said it would be a textile factory. Over the years the "textile factory" story has acquired legendary status, but exactly when the story came about has been a mystery. But recently unearthed U.S. government documents — an embassy telegram and a memorandum by the Deputy Chief of Mission — help solve this historical puzzle. They show that during a helicopter flight in September 1960, with American Ambassador Ogden Reid and others of his staff on board, not far from the reactor site, Ambassador Reid (or one of the travelers) asked what the big construction site was. Their host, Addy Cohen, a senior Treasury Ministry official, replied, "Why, that's a textile plant." In December 1960, when the Dimona issue was publicly exposed, Cohen was asked why he had said "textile factory." He responded: "that was our story at the time." Cohen acknowledged that "we have been misbehaving" by keeping Dimona secret, but justified the project as a "deterrent" against Arab neighbors.Today the National Security Archive, the Nuclear Proliferation International History Project and the Center for Nonproliferation Studies of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey publish for the first time these two items and other declassified documents on the "discovery" of Dimona. The documents provide new perspectives on how the Eisenhower administration learned about the secret reactor project, how it reacted to the discovery, and how the Israelis responded. Among the findings are these:The initial "discovery" by the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv of the French-Israeli reactor project was probably in late July 1960, when a U.S. corporate official learned about it from an Israeli oil executive and told U.S. diplomats that the site would be a power reactor. This is the earliest known reference to Dimona.The admission by French Foreign Minister Maurice Couve de Murville on December 16 to Secretary of State Christian Herter that France had helped Israel build the reactor, a "replica of [the] Marcoule plant." He also told Herter that under the bilateral agreement, France would supply Israel the raw materials and receive any plutonium produced by the plant. In reply to Herter's question about the plant's financing, Couve said that he "assumed the money came from [the United States]"Former Treasury Ministry official Addy Cohen ad libbed the "textile plant" story in response to questions on a helicopter tour [See above and sidebar].An unidentified official close to Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, according to an Embassy telegram, told the Canadian ambassador that the secrecy surrounding Dimona was unjustifiable and that it was "a stupid mistake on the part of Israel." Assistant Secretary for Near Eastern Affairs G. Lewis Jones agreed: It was "stupid of them" and an "unnecessary … Israeli caper."The financial aspects of the Dimona project, i.e., cost, financing, and the role of U.S. money — through both the diversion of U.S. government aid and the use of tax-deductible individual charities — played an important role in the Eisenhower administration's internal deliberations on Dimona. Washington considered applying, but apparently did not use, the power to withhold economic assistance as pressure on Israel.When the U.S. started asking questions about Dimona, and then when the issue was leaked to the press, an irritated Prime Minister Ben-Gurion asked Ambassador Ogden Reid: "Why in [the] States is everything being told [to] everybody?" Ben-Gurion stuck to the new Israeli cover story, namely, that the Dimona reactor was for peaceful purposes only, and for the economic development of the Negev in particular — no more than a step towards the building of nuclear power stations and the production of electric power, a badly needed resource.A State Department message to the embassy in Tel Aviv conveyed a sense of irritation with the responses of the Israeli government: Ben-Gurion's explanations "appear evasive" and the "clearly apparent lack of candor [is] difficult to reconcile with [the] confidence which had traditionally characterized U.S.-Israel relations." The Department wanted more questions asked and more detailed and frank answers from Ben-Gurion.In June 1959 Israel and Norway signed a secret agreement providing for Norway to sell heavy water to Israel (through the United Kingdom). According to the U.S. embassy first secretary in Oslo, Richard Kerry (father of Secretary of State John Kerry), disclosure of the agreement could be embarrassing to the Norwegian government in light of its efforts to play the role of an "honest broker" in international conflicts, including in the Middle East.Also published in this collection are important documents that have been available in previous National Security Archive postings, but are a significant part of the record of the discovery of Dimona, including:A Special National Intelligence Estimate — SNIE 100-8-60 from 8 December 1960 — that formally determined that "Israel is engaged in construction of a nuclear reactor complex in the Negev near Beersheba" and "plutonium production for weapons is at least one major purpose of this effort." The SNIE estimated "that Israel will produce some weapons grade plutonium in 1963-64 and possibly as early as 1962." A significant portion of the SNIE is still classified.President Eisenhower's meeting with top advisers on 19 December 1960 to discuss the Dimona problem, ponder the issues raised by Israeli fundraising in the United States, and discuss plans to encourage Israel to open up Dimona to visits by U.S. or reliable foreign scientists and to subject the reactor to International Atomic Energy Agency inspections. Some portions of this meeting record are also still classified.The post-mortem on SNIE 100-8-60 ordered by the U.S. Intelligence Board whereby the intelligence community tried to determine what pieces of information it had missed and to learn lessons from the intelligence failure.The Eisenhower administration's "discovery" during the last months of 1960 that Israel was secretly building a large nuclear complex at Dimona was a belated one indeed. It occurred more than five years after Israel had made a secret national commitment to create a nuclear program aiming at providing an option to produce nuclear weapons; more than three years after Israel had signed its secret comprehensive nuclear bargain with France; and two years or more after Israel had begun the vast excavation and construction work at the Dimona site.The tardiness of the discovery was a major blunder, what is called in our times an intelligence failure. In comparative terms, it was probably as severe as (or more so than) the failures to anticipate the Indian nuclear tests of in 1974 and 1998. Some of the documents included in this e-book provide clues as to why the discovery was delayed and the roots and causes of the intelligence failure.What amounted to an intelligence breakdown by the United States was a tremendous counterintelligence success for Israel. The U.S. bungle enabled Israel to buy precious time for the highly vulnerable Dimona project. One could argue that had the United States discovered Dimona two years earlier, perhaps even a year earlier, that the young and fragile undertaking might not have survived. Early political pressure from the United States on the two foreign suppliers, France and Norway, might have terminated it at the very start.The documents presented here reveal how surprised and angry the Eisenhower administration was when it learned about Dimona — and yet how circumspect Washington was in its reaction to the discovery. There was a huge gap between what senior U.S. officials said to each other about Dimona and what they said to the Israelis. On the one hand, the Americans were convinced that the evidence they had amassed indicated that it was plutonium production-oriented project with weapons potential that posed a significant proliferation risk. They were irritated that the Israelis were trying to pull the wool over their eyes with all manner of evasive answers and misleading stories. Apparently they had many doubts about Ben-Gurion's new cover story as well. On the other hand, the administration masked its anger and suspicions; opting for a cautious approach, it chose not to be confrontational but to confine itself largely to: 1) seeking answers about Dimona and Israel's intentions, and 2) encouraging Israel to accept visits by U.S. scientists and consent to applying International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards to Dimona, as a way to constrain Israeli freedom of action. There are hints that U.S. diplomats warned the Israelis that U.S. economic aid could be jeopardized, but with only weeks left in office the Eisenhower administration was in no position to coerce its ally over the issue.To appreciate the full historical context of the American intelligence failure we need to say a little bit about the Dimona project itself. In 1955, soon after David Ben-Gurion came back to power as Israel's prime minister and minister of defense, he launched a secret feasibility initiative to determine whether, and how, Israel could build a nuclear infrastructure to support a program aiming at producing nuclear explosives. Ben-Gurion delegated that difficult task to a young (32 years of age) and highly ambitious lieutenant, Shimon Peres, whose formal position was then the director general of the Ministry of Defense. Within three years, from 1955 to 1958, Peres did almost the impossible: he managed to transform the idea of a national nuclear program from a vague vision of the future into a real technological project in the making.Unlike the chair of the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission (IAEC), Professor David Ernst Bergmann, who preached self-reliance, Peres's overall philosophy was that Israel must not (and cannot) reinvent the wheel and therefore must find a foreign supplier who could provide the most comprehensive nuclear package possible, one suited for a weapons-oriented program.[1]Those three years were filled with internal deliberations, debates and planning. Often different courses of action were examined simultaneously, on parallel or even conflicting tracks. At least three countries were considered at one time or another to be the foreign supplier: the United States, France, Norway and, to a limited extent, the United Kingdom. In historical perspective, it appears that by 1958, the project's international master plan had become firmly drawn: France would be the foreign supplier, Norway would provide the heavy water and possibly the backup in case the French card went wrong, and the United States would provide a small peaceful package, under "Atoms of Peace," that could serve as the camouflage for the whole project, mostly as a way to conceal Israel's real achievement — Dimona — from the United States.This raises the issue of secrecy. The story of Dimona is one of a huge secret. Secrecy was essential in order to shield and insulate the highly vulnerable, newly born, project from a hostile outside. At the very core, of course, it is an Israeli secret - the largest, most comprehensive and longest-held secret Israel has ever generated. However, it is more than an Israeli secret; Israel had partners in this venture. The prime partner was the chief foreign supplier, France; the second was Norway, in concert with the British.And then there was the United States. I… truncated (75,181 more characters in archive)