Arnon Milchan - "Mr. Israel" and 9/11

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Arnon Milchan - "Mr. Israel" and 9/11
By: Christopher Bollyn (sent by Invictus) on: 04.10.2011 [20:38 ] (335 reads)
   
In Confidential, a recent biograpy of Arnon Milchan, Israel's LAKAM agent Number One, the authors reveal that Milchan and Peres are "strategic partners" and "holders of some of Israel's most significant secrets." Chief among these secrets would certainly be how Israeli agents carried out 9/11.

Arnon Milchan, born in Israel in 1944, has led the kind of life that Ian Fleming and John le Carre loved to write about... He's a superagent in the real-world sense, and the closest thing to a real-life James Bond that one could imagine.
- Confidential: The Life of Secret Agent Turned Hollywood Tycoon - Arnon Milchan (2011)

Beyond the whispers and the movies, few people know of Arnon's role in supplying Israel with its defense needs, and in creating its ultimate deterrence capabilities... For me, he is 'Mr. Israel.'
- Sumner Redstone, Chairman of the Board, Viacom Inc.

"Tell us about this Israeli movie producer."
- William F. Fahey, U.S. District Attorney to Richard Kelly Smyth, Milchan's U.S. supplier of nuclear triggers smuggled to Israel, January 1985


"MR. ISRAEL" - Israel's senior LAKAM agent Arnon Milchan (center) has long been the man bridging Israel's intelligence establishment with each new government. In this photo from 2005, Milchan sits between his old friends Vice Prime Minister Shimon Peres and Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a former employee of Milchan's chemical company, Milchan Bros. Milchan was the essential agent in building Israel's nuclear arsenal. So, what does he know about the Israeli-made super-thermite that demolished the World Trade Center?

MAN IN THE MIDDLE

If one considers the known evidence of Israeli prior knowledge of 9/11, the Odigo text messages and the five arrested Mossad agents, for example, as indicative of Israeli state involvement in the crime, the identity of the hidden power behind the cover-up is rather obvious. The "hidden hand" suppressing the information about 9/11 would have to be a high-level person in the Israeli political-military intelligence establishment who has very close relations with media kingpins like Murdoch, Levin, and Eisner. Arnon Milchan (a.k.a. Milchen) is such a person.
- Christopher Bollyn, "Arnon Milchan - Mossad's Man in the Middle" from Chapter VIII of Solving 9/11, "The Mass Media & the 9/11 Cover-Up"

The hypothesis that 9/11 was carried out by Israeli agents requires the presence of a high-level Israeli agent playing the role of "man in the middle" between the architects of false-flag terror and the media moguls who shape public opinion through their control of the largest news and entertainment networks in the United States.

The pilot episode of the The Lone Gunmen television series in which a passenger airliner is remotely hijacked and flown into the World Trade Center was filmed in 2000 and aired on television six months before 9/11, on Fox TV in March 2001. The amazingly uncanny similarity of this television show with the events of 9/11 intrigued me and led to my discovery that a senior Israeli intelligence agent named Arnon Milchan was very closely connected with Fox TV, the company that produced the program.



In 2001 Milchan had long been connected to both Rupert Murdoch, owner of News Corp. and its many subsidiaries, and to Gerald Levin, president and CEO of Time Warner and CNN. The success of the Israeli-produced false-flag terror spectacle was critically dependent on the major news media pushing the official, but unproven, explanation and ignoring the many unanswered questions about what really happened. As the highest-level Israeli intelligence agent in the United States, Milchan certainly seemed to be "Mossad's Man in the Middle", co-ordinating the 9/11 cover up with the two largest news media outlets in the United States.

Confidential: The Life of Secret Agent Turned Hollywood Tycoon - Arnon Milchan is a recently published biography of Arnon Milchan (July 2011), the Israeli weapons smuggler/dealer who helped create Israel's nuclear arsenal. Written by the Israeli Meir Doron, a family friend who was raised in Milchan's hometown of Rehovot, and his brother-in-law Joseph Gelman, Confidential is a sympathetic biography written by a couple Zionist Jews, which explains their comparison of Milchan with James Bond in the prologue.

Like most things concerning Israel, how one views Arnon Milchan is all a matter of perspective. A Zionist devoted to the State of Israel may very well see Milchan as a Jewish James Bond while an American like myself is much more likely to view Milchan as one of Ian Fleming's villains, not unlike Ernst Stavro Blofeld (a.k.a. "Number One"), the evil genius with aspirations of world domination as head of the global criminal organization SPECTRE.


LAKAM'S AGENT NUMBER ONE - Arnon Milchan's illegal smuggling of 810 krytron triggers for an off-the-books nuclear arsenal in the hands of a global criminal organization of Zionist terrorists is something that Ian Fleming's criminal masterminds would have tried to pull off...


...like Ernst Stavro Blofeld, "Number One" and head of SPECTRE.

There is, of course, a fundamental difference between the James Bond character and Arnon Milchan. Bond (Agent 007) is an agent of the British secret service who is sent on missions to find and neutralize foreign criminal organizations that pose a grave danger to Britain and the West by stealing their nuclear secrets and technology. Arnon Milchan, on the other hand, has long been a master thief and senior agent in such an organization, LAKAM or Mossad II. LAKAM is the very same "rogue outfit" run by Rafael "Dirty Rafi" Eitan in the 1980s that controlled Jonathan J. Pollard, the American Jew who was caught spying for Israel in 1985. Since the 1960s Milchan has been actively engaged in helping Israel create an off-the-books nuclear arsenal, which is at the center of the current instability in the Middle East - and the world.


The Mossad spymaster Rafi Eitan is a senior member of the Israeli Knesset although he is a wanted criminal in the United States. Here Eitan (top) and Ehud Barak, two of the chief suspects of 9/11, sit together in the Knesset, October 2008.

In reading the Milchan biography I found a number of interesting bits of information, which are included in this article with my comments. One of the most interesting things I learned was that Milchan's first big film, in which he invested two million dollars, involved a key scene in which a passenger airliner is flown into a high rise building. The British/French film, The Medusa Touch, was released in 1978. It is worth noting that the Russian Jewish Lord Lew Grade (born Lev Winogradsky) immediately bought the film's foreign rights for $5 million before it was even produced, putting Milchan ahead by a million dollars.


The climactic scene of The Medusa Touch (1978) is of a passenger plane being remotely controlled (by mind) and flown into a high rise building.


The Israeli agent Arnon Milchan's first big film simulated a plane crashing into a high rise - in 1978. This happens to have been the same year that the former Mossad chief, Isser Harel, predicted that Arab terrorists would strike New York City's tallest tower. This is no coincidence.


Such a scene had never been filmed before and required a great deal of work to make it look real...


and to achieve the desired effect, which can be seen in the short clip from the movie below. (The added comments can be ignored.)



It should be noted that Arnon Milchan is one of Israel's longest serving and most senior intelligence agents, having served the State of Israel since the early 1960s. For Milchan to produce a film that depicts an airliner flying into a high rise in the same year (1978) that the former head of Israeli intelligence predicted an attack by Arab terrorists on the tallest building in New York City is certainly no coincidence. This is when the terrorist Likudniks came to power in Israel and when high level Israeli terrorists began planning 9/11. Milchan's movie was useful in visualizing the false-flag attacks that occurred 23 years later.

The following are a few extracts from Confidential with my comments on the Israeli-written biography of Arnon Milchan.

"Arnon is a special man. It was I who recruited him. Working secretly, from outside the official system, he brought extraordinary ideas and a level of creativity that greatly contributed to our country. When I was at the Ministry of Defense, Arnon was involved in numerous defense-related procurement activities and intelligence operations. His strength is in making connections at the highest levels in countries around the world, including important countries with which Israel does not officially maintain relationships. His activities gave us a huge advantage, strategically, diplomatically and technologically..."
- Israeli President Shimon Peres, 8 February 2010



"Arnon Milchan was the Chuck Norris of LAKAM."
- Amnon Abromovich, Globes (Israel), 24 April 2008

FUNDING ISRAEL'S COVERT CRIMES

Rules that applied to others did not apply to Milchan; perhaps it was not a "license to kill," but very close to it. He fronted secret bank accounts for the State of Israel – accounts that would be used to finance his country's most covert and sometimes deadly intelligence operations around the globe. (p. 18)

Bollyn: Milchan controlled Israeli government-backed accounts and front companies that financed "the special needs of the entirety of Israel's intelligence operations outside the country." The "special needs" included buying components to build and maintain Israel's nuclear arsenal.

"MINISTER OF FINANCE" – AUGUST 1965

Moshe Dayan pointed at Milchan and told Peres, "You know what, Shimon? I want Arnon as minister of finance."

"OK," Peres replied with a sly smile...

What Milchan did not understand was that Dayan and Peres had in mind a completely different kind of "minister of finance," unelected, secret, far outside the country, and in service indefinitely. (p. 39)



PERES'S NEED "TO DECEIVE PEOPLE ON A LARGE SCALE"

Immediately upon embarking on the massive, covert Israeli version of the Manhattan Project, Peres (who is today a Nobel Peace laureate) realized that he would have to deceive people on a large scale to avoid discovery... He also realized that the program would need to gain access to material and equipment that was not easily obtainable on the open market, and that few countries would be willing to sell such material to Israel.

To overcome these complex and daunting problems, Peres decided to create a new top-secret agency, a unit so secret that even Israel's vaunted intelligence agency, the Mossad, would not be aware of its existence for years to come, even though it operated right under its very nose. (p. 44)

MOSSAD II

In the early 1970s, the unit would adopt the name Science Liaison Bureau, or LAKAM, its Hebrew acronym, and was nicknamed "Mossad II." Its original narrow mission was to secure the materials and the equipment that would make the production of nuclear bombs possible. (p. 44)

LAKAM'S MOST PRODUCTIVE ASSET

The close working relationship between Milchan and Benjamin Blumberg was exceedingly productive, and much of it will never be known... When Blumberg needed a thousand tons of ammonium perchlorate, Butarez, carbon-carbon, inertial-grade gyros and accelerometers, precision tracking radars, and other such basic material required by anyone seeking to develop a nuclear deterrent, it was Milchan he would call.

Milchan's constant movement between countries and continents make him an elusive target for any counterintelligence effort against him, and it made him the most productive asset for LAKAM and for the State of Israel. (p. 54)

MOSSAD'S MAN IN THE MIDDLE

But Milchan took it even a step further. He offered Peres and Dayan the use of his company as a front in order to open subsidiaries wherever LAKAM or the Mossad deemed necessary for their activities.

Milchan would open accounts and front companies for the State of Israel, essentially putting him in charge of the mechanisms and the resources to finance the special needs of the entirety of Israel's intelligence operations outside of the country. This is how Milchan gradually became the indispensable man in the middle. (p. 60)

The surprise that rocked Israel following the elections to the Ninth Knesset on May 17, 1977, shook the country to its political foundation. The conservative Likud party, under the leadership of Menachem Begin came to power for the first time, ousting the Labor Party, which had controlled all political power in the country in one form or another since its inception...

Milchan quickly adapted to the new political leaders Likud was comprised of Zionist terrorists from the Irgun in town; Shimon Peres was a real soul mate, but soon Arnon would develop close friendships with others, including incoming minister of defense Ezer Weizman. His friendships and contacts were deep and spanned the entire political spectrum, which placed him as a bridge between the intelligence establishment and the new government – a role that he has continued to play ever since, with almost every Israeli government.

FINANCING COVERT ACTIVITIES

Using middlemen made it harder for outside observers to follow exactly what Israel was purchasing, since the sales were made not to the Israeli government, but to another entity, sometimes even multiple entities. In fact, this is a common counterintelligence practice. The fact that commissions were extracted along the way and funneled into secret accounts controlled by Milchan to finance Israel's covert activities was only the icing on the cake. (p. 137)

MILCHAN AND "DIRTY RAFI" EITAN

In 1981, Benjamin Blumberg finally met his match in Ariel "the Bulldozer" Sharon, who was appointed Israel's new minister of defense. Sharon decided to replace Blumberg with his close friend of many years and former head of the Mossad, Rafi Eitan. He viewed the role of LAKAM chief as one of the most crucial positions in Israel's vast defense machinery. The infighting continued for a few months, but eventually the transition took place. The fifty-five-year-old Rafi Eitan was a short man with thick glasses and a long career in the Mossad behind him. It was Eitan who personally commanded the squad that captured Adolf Eichmann in Argentina. He was well acquainted with Milchan, and was well aware of his activities on behalf of LAKAM. (p. 145)


As Israel's key operations agent since the mid 1960s, Milchan has been at the top Israel's intelligence establishment since 1965.

MILCHAN'S MONEY TRICK

He understood that Hollywood throws money at those who have money, so from time to time he would flaunt it, but only with a larger strategic purpose in mind. Metaphorically speaking, the trick was to use the million dollars in the bank to project an image of thirty million. It was his modus operandi since day one. (p. 202)

MILCHAN AND NETANYAHU

"I expect that nobody in the Israeli government is interested in the fact that you skimmed off sixty percent of all the profit on things that Milco International, Inc. sent to Milchan Bros. After all, Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel before Sharon and current, worked for Milchan Bros. Could it be that part of the sixty percent you "skimmed" was for Israeli Government officials? ...

"Well, Arnon, if I'm extradited to the U.S. and stand trial for shipping krytrons to your company, Milchan Bros., the world is going to know all the shady dealing you were involved in – I'm sure."
- Richard Kelly Smyth's letter to Arnon Milchan from prison in Spain, 22 August 2001 (p. 215)

Bollyn: There was no trial, of course, and Smyth was given a deal in which he plead guilty to one charge and received 40 months in the federal prison system in California. Smyth, as president of the company Milco International Inc., was originally indicted for selling 810 krytrons to an Israeli-based firm, Heli Corp. The owner of Heli Corp, Arnon Milchan, denied involvement in the $60,000 krytron deal. Milco ("Milchan Co.") was also established by Milchan. This is a very good example of how Mossad companies are often on both sides of a deal, as seller and buyer, not unlike what happened to the steel evidence from the World Trade Center after 9/11, when it was shipped by Zionist controlled scrap dealers in New Jersey to Zionist controlled steel companies in Asia - to be destroyed.

Smyth, a former scientific adviser to the U.S. Air Force and to NATO, pleaded guilty to one count of violating the Arms Export Control Act and to making a false statement to Customs. Prosecutors dropped 28 other counts. A trial would have shed light on Arnon Milchan and the role of Israel's LAKAM in the illegal smuggling of nuclear triggers. In such sensitive matters, like the false-flag terrorism of 9/11, an open trial is the last thing the Zionist crimocracy wants.


Milchan succeeded in smuggling 810 krytron nuclear triggers to Israel before being discovered in 1985. Israel returned 710, saying that one hundred krytrons had been destroyed. While Richard Kelly Smyth spent 16 years as a fugitive in Spain and then went to prison, the Israeli who masterminded the whole operation, Arnon Milchan, was not even charged and allowed to continue his illegal activities on behalf of Israel in Hollywood and elsewhere.

"UZI FALAFEL"

Oliver Stone didn't take this very well. He had a contract for another movie with Milchan. He briefly considered the outrageous idea of a film from a script that had been circulating in Hollywood more as a joke than anything else. The working title was Uzi Falafel, and it told the story of an obnoxious Israeli arms dealer who made a lot of money and parlayed it into a new career producing movies. (p. 229)

OLIVER STONE ON MILCHAN

"A top Hollywood executive once warned me to stay clear of Milchan. He told me that Arnon was a Middle Eastern rug dealer. Beware. I should have listened to him, he was right. He is as cheap as they come. He is sick about money, obsessed with losing it. I learned a very hard lesson, and it cost me a lot of my personal money. I don't want to get into a pissing contest, but Arnon can be very nasty."
- Oliver Stone, "The Last Tycoon", Los Angeles Magazine, April 2000 (p. 229)

MURDOCH'S ISRAELI PARTNER

Milchan will not forget that first dinner with the person who became one of his best friends and business partner, Rupert Murdoch, the owner of News Corporation, the parent company of Twentieth Century Fox...

Milchan then asked Murdoch for a favor. He didn't want to consummate the deal without the blessing of his friend Gerald Levin, president and CEO of Time Warner...

Fifty-five percent of New Regency remained in Milchan's hands. Kerry Packer kept his twenty-five percent, and Murdoch picked up twenty percent for about $200 million...

Part of the deal between Fox and New Regency was the establishment of a new TV division. Milchan brought in a good friend, ambitious Israeli TV personality Yair Lapid, to head up the new department. (p. 240)

Bollyn: Yair Lapid is the TV personality who interviewed 3 of the 5 Israeli operatives who were arrested on 9/11 in New Jersey. Oded Ellner, one of the three, told Lapid in November 2001 that their "purpose had been to document the event", the event being the 9/11 destruction of the World Trade Center. Having said they are not agents of Mossad, Lapid did not ask the three who had sent them on their mission. It was understood. The other two Israeli terror suspects, the Kurzberg brothers, who sat in Yair Lapid's audience were known to U.S. law enforcement as agents of Mossad. Hence they did not appear on the show, so the denial of belonging to Mossad could be made without being a false statement.



"MEMBERS OF THE TRIBE"

Gradually, after the year 2000, Arnon began to bring his children into key positions at New Regency. Yariv and his sisters, Alexandra and Elinor, had grown up in boarding schools with a heavy dose of French culture, but as they matured they were exposed to a very wide world thanks to regular international travel with their father. Every year they spent at least one month in Israel and were brought up knowing that they were "members of the tribe," with all of the historical connotations and responsibilities that implied. (p. 246)

MILCHAN – POLITICAL BOSS

From his earliest days, Milchan has had a passion for Israeli politics, and despite his global interests, he has consistently sought to influence the course of historic events in the Middle East from behind the scenes... (p. 247)

Kadima won the elections, Peres was appointed deputy prime minister, and all of his demands were fulfilled. But like his Rafi adventure years earlier, his dream never really materialized. Sharon suffered a series of strokes and became incapacitated. Another close friend of Milchan, the man who named his movie Pretty Woman, Ehud Olmert, became prime minister instead. (p. 249)

Milchan kicked into high gear, maneuvering behind the scenes to replace the president with his longtime friend and mentor, Shimon Peres. By the time Katsav finally resigned, Milchan had already arranged virtual wall-to-wall support for Peres to replace him as the country's president...

The first official letter written by the new president was to thank his longtime friend Milchan, who had stuck with him through thick and thin, to see him to this day...

He's also the de facto Israeli consul general on the West Coast of the United States... He also serves as the primary host of Hollywood's elite when they come to Israel, usually at his initiative. An invitiation from Milchan to visit Israel is an indication of having arrived in Hollywood. (p. 250)

YOSSI MAIMAN

In 2008, Milchan sold Milchan Bros. to a former Mossad agent by the name of Yossi Maiman. (p. 257)

Bollyn: Yossi Maiman also happens to be the Mossad agent who obtained a great deal of control over the lucrative gas fields of Turkmenistan. Linking these Israeli-owned gas fields to India and China by a pipeline crossing Afghanistan is one of the strategic goals of the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan. Maiman and Milchan are partners in other Israeli ventures.

FOX FOREVER

Milchan relocated New Regency from Warner Bros. to Fox in 1998 after News Corp. agreed to make a $200-million equity investment in the company.

On January 14, 2011, New Regency and Fox signed an agreement to extend their distribution relationship through 2022, while at the same time providing a more active role for New Regency involving Fox releases. (p. 259)

Bollyn: Milchan's partnership with Rupert Murdoch and Fox TV began in 1998. Two years later this partnership produced the pilot episode of The Lone Gunmen in which a passenger airliner was hijacked by remote control and flown into the World Trade Center. The program aired on Fox TV in March 2001.

Murdoch's initial $200 million investment in Milchan's company in 1998 is something of a mystery. Why did Murdoch buy into a dodgy company run by an Israeli nuclear criminal? It is, of course, most likely the result of Murdoch simply doing as he is told by the Zionist financiers, e.g. the Rothschilds, who support his Zionist propaganda empire. As the New York Times wrote in July 2011 about Confidential:

In the late 1990s, the News Corporation, which owns Fox, paid $200 million for a 20 percent stake in Mr. Milchan's Regency Enterprises. A News Corporation spokeswoman, Teri Everett, had no immediate response to a query about the company's reason for backing Mr. Milchan, and about any reaction by its chief executive, Rupert Murdoch, to revelations in the new book.

RAFI EITAN

Rafi Eitan went on to a successful political career as the head of Israel's Gil (Pensioners) Party. He served in the Knesset and as special minister without portfolio, advising the prime minister on national security matters. Since the Pollard affair in 1985, Eitan has not been allowed to travel to the United States, where he could be arrested if he did...

LAKAM was officially disbanded as a result of the Pollard affair in 1985. However, it continues to operate worldwide, except in the United States, under a new name. (p. 261)

THE MOST ESSENTIAL AGENT

Israel gained it modern nuclear deterrence capabilities because of the covert efforts of many people, but Milchan was one of the most essential. (p. 262)

BUGGING IRAN

To counter the growing threat, the renamed LAKAM and the Mossad have kicked into high gear. Every known computer system sent to Iran over the past decade has been bugged with monitoring devices. Every possible high-tech system, such as aircraft electronics and spare parts, has been tampered with. (p. 262)

"MR. ISRAEL"

When legendary media mogul Sumner Redstone told us that he considers Milchan to be "Mr. Israel," he had little idea how accurate his sentiments actually are. If one could imagine a single, indispensable person in the middle who knows where all of the bodies are buried when it comes to Israel's secret wars, it would be none other than this heavyweight Hollywood producer, who spends his life seamlessly moving between the world of fame and secrecy, fantasy and reality, war and peace. (p. 264)

Sources and Recommended Reading:

Confidential: The Life of Secret Agent turned Hollywood Tycoon - Arnon Milchan
Meir Doron and Joseph Gelman, Gefen Publishing House Ltd., Jerusalem, Israel 2011

Bollyn, Christopher, "The Mass Media & the 9/11 Cover-Up", Chapter VIII, Solving 9/11 http://www.bollyn.com/the-mass-media-the-9-11-cover-up

Bollyn, "America the Target: 9-11 and Israel's History of False Flag Terrorism", Chapter III, Solving 9/11
http://www.bollyn.com/america-the-targe ... -terrorism

Bollyn, "Israel's Secret Super Thermite Lab", 26 August 2009 http://www.bollyn.com/israels-secret-su ... mite-lab-2

Cieply, Michael, "New Book Recounts Tale of Israeli Agent at Home in Hollywood", New York Times, 17 July 2011

Clip from The Medusa Touch (1978), YouTube.com, 3 October 2011
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVzY3RSrI3k

http://www.bollyn.com/index.php#article_13244

[Michael K.]

CSR,

This is a great story!  Thanks.

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Np...micheal...

There's actually more to this story... of a typical Jew Scammer making it big...   :

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The Daily Beast

The Billionaire and the Fugitive

The story of how Hollywood producer Arnon Milchan worked with Israeli intelligence. An exclusive excerpt from 'Confidential: The Life of Secret Agent Turned Hollywood Tycoon Arnon Milchan.'

by Meir Doron , Joseph Gelman  | July 23, 2011 6:51 PM EDT

In Hollywood, Arnon Milchan is best known as the billionaire producer of films like Pretty Woman and LA Confidential, and as the owner of Fox-based New Regency. But there is another Arnon Milchan, as Meir Doron and Joseph Gelman reveal in their new biography, Confidential: The Life of Secret Agent Turned Hollywood Tycoon Arnon Milchan.

For the first time, the writers expose how in the mid-1960s, while still in his early 20s, Milchan was recruited by Israel's secretive spy agency, LAKAM; how he became a key operative for Israel's top master spies, Benjamin Blumberg and Rafi Eitan, and a confidant of such powerful Israeli politicians as President Shimon Peres and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu; and how he participated in a web of complex undercover schemes to procure armaments for his country.

In this adaption from their book, they detail Milchan's controversial relationship with American aerospace engineer Richard Smyth, a friend who became a fugitive after the U.S. accused him of illegally smuggling nuclear-bomb triggers to Israel. We pick up the two men's story in May 1985.

Arnon Milchan was nervous, very nervous. He had just received a phone call at his Paris apartment from a Newsweek reporter seeking his reaction to the stunning indictment of Dr. Richard Kelly Smyth, president of California-based Milco Ltd.—an Israeli intelligence front company—for shipping krytrons to one of Milchan's Tel Aviv companies.

Krytrons are sophisticated triggers for the detonation of nuclear bombs. According to Smyth, Milchan's company had pushed him hard for the krytrons and knew perfectly what they were for—even though it was illegal to export them from the U.S. without a U.S. State Department munitions license. Milchan's Heli Trading Ltd. had ordered 14 shipments totaling 810 krytrons from 1979-82. Now U.S. Customs and the FBI had moved in and the entire Milco operation was in jeopardy. Milchan feared that a politically ambitious and publicity-hungry U.S. prosecutor would come hunting for him, he told us.

After a short conversation with the Newsweek reporter, in which Milchan pleaded ignorance, he booked the first available flight to Tel Aviv. Within hours, TV crews were camped in front of his penthouse and the phone was ringing off the hook.

Arnon-Milchan-israel

Israeli-American movie producer Arnon Milchan (center) with Israeli Vice Prime Minister Shimon Peres (left) and Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem in 2005, David Silverman / Getty Images

There was one call he could not avoid—from his mother, Shoshanna. "Everyone is calling my son an arms dealer," she said, bursting into tears. "It's embarrassing."  

Arnon was devastated.

"Mother, it's not like I'm instigating wars in third-world countries and shipping them guns," he told her. "I'm doing this to help our country."  

***

Milchan first met Smyth in 1968, when U.S.-based defense contractor Rockwell Inc. sent its newly appointed vice president to Tel Aviv to downgrade relations, under pressure from the Arab world.

Smyth was a senior engineer who had grown up in rural Oklahoma and struggled to put himself through school, obtaining a B.S. in physics from Caltech as well as a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and mathematics from USC. Along the way, he'd gotten married and fathered five children.

In his early 40s, he couldn't be more different from the flamboyant figure he now met at the Tel Aviv airport. Tall, athletic and rich, Milchan was only 24 years old but had already made a mark in Israel, where he had taken over his late father's fertilizer company and transformed it from near-bankruptcy to mega-million success.

    'I am restrained from recommending any single individual for our highest defense-related honor,' Shimon Peres told us, 'but undoubtedly Milchan is worthy of such an acknowledgement.'  

As Milchan grew the business, he had come to the attention of up-and-coming politician Shimon Peres, who introduced Milchan to Benjamin Blumberg, nicknamed Israel's "prince of silence," the head of LAKAM (a Hebrew acronym for the Science Liaison Bureau). LAKAM's very existence was unknown to the United States at the time.

Milchan's recruitment in the 60's was gradual. "It was almost a glamorous thing to be involved," he acknowledged in a March 5, 2000 60 Minutes interview. "Everybody looked to me as a James Bond." He confirmed his involvement to us in a November 2009 interview at his offices on the 20th Century Fox lot, one of a number of meetings we had with him between August 2009 and March 2010.
confidential arnon milchan

Confidential: The Life of Secret Agent Turned Hollywood Tycoon, Arnon Milchan by Meir Doron and Joseph Gelman. 310 pages. Gefen Books. $24.95.

Blumberg taught Milchan how to establish front companies and secret bank accounts; meanwhile, foreign arms suppliers like Rockwell and Raytheon were encouraged to hire Milchan as their "representative" in Israel. Within a few years, he was acting as a middleman for weapons transactions, raking in hundreds of millions of dollars in commissions that in fact would fund LAKAM and Mossad activities.

Now here he was, meeting Smyth on Israel's behalf, to do a deal with Rockwell. Its representative, he discovered, was a modestly successful functionary with a strong taste for the good life, money and women, possessed of a rather inflated ego, who insisted on using his "doctor" title at every opportunity.

Over the ensuing years, this disparate pair would grow closer.

Their first joint endeavor was a Rockwell–Israel Aircraft Industries project called Ibex, designed to develop a sophisticated ring of electronic listening posts around the borders of Iran, as Milchan confirmed in our interview.

"I established strong connections between Rockwell and Israel Aircraft Industries," Milchan acknowledged, adding that he tried but failed to connect Rockwell, Smyth and other companies in Israel.

Throughout these early years, Smyth remained a devoted employee of Rockwell—which, at its peak, was number 27 on the Forbes 500 list. But Smyth's desire to do bigger and better was evident, and Milchan, a man of considerable charm, knew how to exploit it. So in late 1972, over dinner at Tel Aviv's Kasbah restaurant, he suggested this was the moment for Smyth to make "real money" in his own procurement business by striking out on his own. It was a risk; matters like health insurance, retirement pension and job security weighed heavily on Smyth.

But when Milchan emphasized that he could supply him with all of the orders he could possibly handle, Smyth agreed.

"Greed was certainly a factor," Milchan reflected when we asked about Smyth's thinking.

Smyth broached the notion to Rockwell and was surprised that his bosses were delighted: Having him operate independently gave them a solution to the constant pressure they'd felt from the Saudis to cut ties with Israel. Instead of ordering from Rockwell directly, trade with Israel could be funneled through Smyth's new company, Milco International Inc.

And so on January 19, 1973, Smyth officially registered Milco in Orange County, Calif., and got his new business under way. Its dealings with Milchan Brothers—Arnon's Israel-based company—were simple: Milchan's office manager, Dvora Ben Yitzhak, working directly with Blumberg, would send a coded telex to Smyth listing sensitive items that they wished to order on behalf of Israel. Milchan himself would make contact only when necessary.

"Everything I did, I did in coordination with Mr. Milchan and was in contact with him almost on a daily basis," Dvora told us in October 2009.  

"Milco and their employees had secret clearances that permitted them to [obtain] consulting contracts with government agencies and contractors," Smyth wrote in an extraordinary book about his exploits, Irrational Indictment & Imprisonment For Export Krytrons to Israel, written in 2008 under the pseudonym Dr. Jon Schiller—one of several sources for Smyth's true story, in addition to documentation from his legal proceedings and confirmation supplied by a high-level Israeli intelligence operative.

After a while, that included the purchase of krytrons, a small, seventy five dollar, cold-cathode gas filled tube intended for use as a high-speed switch, which among other things, serves as triggers for the detonation of nuclear bombs. It was illegal to export krytrons at the time without a munitions export license, and its export to Israel had been rejected before.

"It's always the little things that cause the most problems," Milchan shrugged, when we asked him about it.

***

Over the following decade, Smyth's business moved briskly.

He was able to ship long lists of sensitive products to Israel: training simulators for air defense missiles, voice scramblers and lasers, computerized flight control systems, thermal batteries, gyroscopes for missile guidance systems, neutron generators, high-speed oscilloscopes, high voltage condensers, and many other dual-use components—almost everything a country might need to turn itself into a high-tech, nuclear armed powerhouse.

Smyth's relationship with Milchan was all-important; over 80 percent of his business with Israel was done through Milchan Bros. and satellite companies such as Heli Trading. Thanks to Milchan, Smyth grew wealthy, maintaining two waterfront properties in Huntington Beach and an apartment on Catalina Island, Calif. He joined the local Cabrillo Beach Yacht Club there and by 1977 had reached the membership rank of commodore.

Life for the commodore was good.

It was also good for Milchan, who had started producing movies, initially with the David Soul starrer The Stick-Up, "a movie so bad that I had my name removed from the credits," he told us. That was followed by Black Joy, The Medusa Touch starring Richard Burton, and the Robert De Niro vehicle King of Comedy.

Then on Christmas Eve, 1984, just as Milchan was working on Once Upon a Time in America, Smyth flipped through his mail and found a letter ordering him to appear before a federal prosecutor in Los Angeles to answer questions about the krytrons and face possible charges of high crimes and misdemeanors.

Smyth felt a sudden sinking feeling. Even though he would later claim he was ignorant about the illegality of his exports, he knew just how severe the punishment could be.

He tried desperately to reach Milchan—and failed.

"I felt bad, but I was ordered to cut all contact with Smyth," Milchan maintained.

Informing his attorney that his court appearance was scheduled to take place at the precise time his family would be on vacation in Israel—true, as it turned out—Smyth was granted permission to leave the country, provided he post a $1 million bond.

In Israel, Smyth began a frantic search for his patron. He went to Milchan's office, dialed every number he knew, stopped by restaurants they had frequented together, even reached out to LAKAM and high-level officials he had met there. Every door snapped shut.

Then he received a call from Dvora, who agreed to meet with him.

During that meeting at the Tel Aviv Hilton, the two discussed Smyth's situation at length. Dvora asked what information Smyth had divulged about her boss, along with any other activities he might have unveiled. Smyth insisted he'd said nothing incriminating; even so, he was never allowed to speak to Milchan himself.

Back home, petrified, Smyth couldn't sleep. He was facing 105 years in prison for what he portrayed as essentially a clerical error. Terror consumed him. He'd become radioactive as far as his former friends were concerned.

"When we went to social meetings and walked towards longtime friends to talk to them, they would turn their backs and walk away," he wrote in Irrational Indictment. Worse, he was strapped for cash, too, as almost all of Milco's orders had dried up, and attorneys' fees were piling up.

Tempted to throw himself at the mercy of the prosecutor, he didn't only because his wife, Emilie, refused. Then in 1985, Emilie herself broke down. Rushing out of the Milco offices where she worked with her husband, sobbing, she drove home and drank an entire bottle of vodka. Her daughter found her unconscious on the floor and raced her to the hospital, where she recovered.

Finally, in August, Smyth received a call from his attorney's assistant urging a plea bargain and informing him it was the firm's considered opinion there was a good chance he'd face prison.

"How can I go to prison?" Smyth demanded, according to the book. "I haven't done anything wrong!"  

"Don't you know prisons are full of people who didn't do anything wrong?" the assistant responded.

In that moment, Smyth knew he and his wife must follow a plan they had already set in motion that would change their lives forever.

Taking Milco's $15,000 emergency cash reserve, Smyth dyed his gray hair black. The couple packed lightly, in a state of deep fear and paranoia, then drove randomly for about 20 minutes, making U-turns and detours, hyper-alert to the danger of being followed. Once satisfied they were safe, they headed for Los Angeles International Airport, where they abandoned their car with the keys in it, and paid cash for one-way paid tickets out of the country.

"We hurried to board the aircraft," Smyth recalled in the book. "All we were carrying after our 34 years of marriage were two under-the-seat luggage pieces."

In Frankfurt, a German official opened the passport of one Dr. Jon Schiller. Everything was spot-on. After a brief hesitation, he stamped the passport and said, "Welcome to Germany."

***

While the Smyths were on the run, Milchan was engaged in a battle with Universal over executive Sidney Sheinberg's refusal to release his and director Terry Gilliam's movie Brazil. The drama led Gilliam to take out a full-page ad in the trades demanding that the movie be released; it also strained Milchan's dealings with a top Hollywood power player, Lew Wasserman's right-hand man.

But the "Schillers" were dealing with bigger problems. They quickly left Frankfurt for Zurich, Switzerland, where they waited desperately for financial support from LAKAM. At last, the money arrived and the Smyths relocated to a new safe house in Malaga. Incremental deposits to their bank account gave them the means to survive and allowed them, for the first time in months, to breathe easier.

Time passed; weeks turned to years; their paranoia faded and the couple almost forgot they were fugitives. Under the Schiller alias, they even voted in the Malaga municipal elections.

According to Smyth's self-published book—something confirmed by Dvora herself—Milchan's assistant maintained regular communication with him, via telephone and fax, though he and Emilie never heard directly from Milchan. Little by little, they grew to feel secure, with enough money to meet their basic needs. Life wasn't luxurious, but at least it was free from danger.

By 1994, Smyth had spent nine years in Spain as a fugitive. Turning 65, unhappy with his modest lifestyle, especially when compared to his glory days of yachting and multiple residences, he took a mind-boggling risk and applied for his U.S. Social Security benefits, betting that no low-level bureaucrat in the Social Security Administration would make the connection.

He was right—at first. For seven more years, the Smyths lived on both that income and the money LAKAM had supplied them. And then, in June 2001, everything unraveled.

It began harmlessly enough, with a call from the manager of Banco Bilbao in Malaga, who asked Schiller to stop by. During their meeting, he informed him he'd have to obtain a non-resident permit in order to continue banking there. This, in turn, meant a visit to the local police station.

Upon arriving at the station, Smyth and his wife were instructed to go to the back office and wait. After 15 minutes, Smyth turned to Emilie and asked, "What's taking so long?" Then a tall officer in a dark blue uniform entered the room, walked over to a fax machine and pulled out a paper. He handed it to Smyth without a word. The fugitive was shocked to see a black-and-white photo of himself, taken some 20 years earlier. The word "Interpol" was marked at the top of the page.

A sudden sense of dread overcame him.

"Is this you?" the officer asked. Smyth confirmed it was. Then the officer turned to Emilie and announced, "I am placing this man under arrest."

Overnight, Smyth's life was transformed.

He was shoved into a concrete, windowless cell with a raised cement area that served as a bed and two filthy blankets. The toilet down the hall was a simple hole in the ground with no toilet paper. Food was served in small plastic containers. There were no guards at night, so when the 72-year-old prisoner had to urinate, he did so on the floor of his cell.

That first night was hell. He went through the process that led to his capture over and over, knowing he'd had multiple opportunities to dodge this outcome: He could have avoided applying for Social Security; he could have walked right out of the police station; he could simply have denied that the man in the picture was him. He could have stayed at Rockwell all those years ago and avoided the whole mess.

When Milchan heard of Smyth's arrest, he knew it would be a big deal. His name would be mentioned—not for the first time—in connection to what he'd described to The Los Angeles Times in 1992 as "the unbelievable stupid krytron story." On the one hand, he was furious at the carelessness of it all; on the other, he felt sorry for the man.

On November 15, 2001, more than 16 years after Smyth's escape to Frankfurt, he was extradited to the United States. There, Judge Pamela Ann Rymer handed down a prison sentence of 40 months and a $20,000 fine, with two years' probation—a light sentence compared to what he had faced 16 years earlier. Still, Smyth sat in the courtroom in shock, unable to move.

It would be four years before he was a free man.

***

Milchan has always insisted he knew nothing about the krytrons. "I'm not saying I'm an innocent person, but in this specific case, I knew nothing about it," he told Premiere magazine in June 1993.

When interviewed for this book, he insisted he never profited from the arms deals, but merely took part in them as a service to his country—something confirmed by Shimon Peres.

"I am restrained from recommending any single individual for our highest defense-related honor," he told us, "but undoubtedly Milchan is worthy of such an acknowledgement."

The Smyth incident has barely affected Milchan. His business has grown; he is now married to his second wife, Amanda Coetzer, a former South African tennis star; he has residences all over the world, from Tel Aviv to South Africa to Malibu. He also has friends at the highest echelons of power, in Hollywood and politics. Rupert Murdoch, an investor in New Regency, calls him one of the most honest men he knows. He is admired, if not always loved.

As for Smyth, today, he ekes out a living conducting investment seminars. He is still living with his wife of 60 years, Emilie, and his past as a celebrated fugitive has almost been forgotten. But he has lost his money, his reputation and his various houses.

When we tracked him down in August, 2009, he looked old and frail and was living in a mobile home in Lompoc, Calif.—ironically, just 30 miles from Arnon Milchan's vineyard.

It's been 26 years since the two men last spoke.

All rights reserved. Hardcover: Gefen and Ebook: 21st Street Books.


©2011 The Newsweek/Daily Beast Company LLC

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2 ... gence.html

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

'Hollywood producer was an Israeli nuclear agent'
Posted on July 21, 2011 | Leave a comment




Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie and Arnon Milchan at event of Mr. & Mrs. Smith. Photo by Lester Cohen – © WireImage.com – Image courtesy WireImage.com

According to a new biography, Arnon Milchan, close friend of Israeli prime ministers and Hollywood stars, was recruited by Shimon Peres to purchase equipment for Israel's alleged nuclear program.

haaretz.com | Jul 18, 2011

By Yossi Melman Tags

Israeli businessman and Hollywood producer Arnon Milchan was a longtime weapons dealer and Israeli intelligence agent who purchased equipment for Israel's alleged nuclear program, a new biography claims.

The book, "Confidential: The Life of Secret Agent Turned Hollywood Tycoon Arnon Milchan," written by Meir Doron and Joseph Gelman, recounts Milchan's life story, from his days as a boy in Rehovot through his friendships with Israeli prime ministers, U.S. presidents and Hollywood stars.

Milchan's services to the Israeli security industry have been made public before, but he has always denied or refused to acknowledge them. This is the first time Milchan confirms these claims, albeit indirectly.

Related

This Famous Hollywood Producer Was Also An Israeli Arms Dealer

Even though the authors claim to have written an unofficial biography, Milchan agreed to meet with them, answer their questions and correct their mistakes. One of the major sources for the book was Israeli President Shimon Peres, a close friend of Milchan.

"I am the one who recruited him," Peres is quoted as saying.

This occurred in the 1960′s, when Peres was Deputy Minister of Defense. The relationship continued in the 1970′s, when Peres became Minister of Defense. He recruited Milchan as an agent for Lakam, an acronym for 'Science Liaison Bureau.' Lakam is the name of a secret unit in the defense ministry that was tasked with purchasing equipment, namely technological parts and materials for Israel's alleged nuclear program.

Since its founding in the mid-1950′s, the agency was headed by Benjamin Blumberg. Blumberg was fired in 1978 by Defense Minister Ezer Weizman following the Likud's party rise to power. Weizman claimed that Lakam was involved in illegal money transfers to different bodies, including the Labor Party.

Blumberg was Milchan's friend, and used him (as well as other Israeli businessmen) to set up straw companies around the world, and to open secret bank accounts for financing the nuclear plant in Dimona and other Israeli security industries.

The basis for Milchan's secret actions was the family firm Milchan Brothers, which represented foreign chemical companies in Israel since before independence.

Lakam was in effect an intelligence unit dealing with technological and scientific espionage, and served as a kind of "theft contractor" for the Israeli security industry. Besides using businessmen, Lakam also appointed scientific attaches in Israeli embassies around the world. After he was fired, Blumberg was replaced by Rafi Eytan, who continued to use his services.

For years, Milchan operated in secret, yet in the mid-1980′s U.S. customs uncovered an attempt to smuggle "switches" – equipment that can be used both for medical purposes and for nuclear weapons manufacture – by the California-based Milco company, owned by Milchan. The company's CEO, Richard Kelly Smyth, was arrested and released on bail. He fled the country soon after.

Smyth was declared a fugitive, and according to some reports found refuge in Israel. In 2001 he was captured in Spain and was brought back to the U.S., where he stood trial and was incarcerated. The FBI began an investigation into Milchan's affairs, yet he has never been charged.

According to the book, right after the "switches" fiasco Milchan called his friend Peres, then prime minister, and asked for his help in dealing with the Ronald Reagan administration. Milchan is quoted in the book as saying he never received money for his services, and that everything he did was for the state of Israel.

http://aftermathnews.wordpress.com/2011 ... ear-agent/

[Timothy_Fitzpatrick]

This reminds me of the movie Wag the Dog. Perhaps the movie was made by or about Milchan. I first learned of The Lone Gunmen episode foreshadowing 9/11 from Judas Goat Jones. Surprise, surprise, Jonesy didn't mention a thing about Milchan. He even interviewed one of the actors, Dean Haglund.

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Jewish writer on Blumberg and Milchan... looks like Blumberg may have had connections with the Jew Hit on John F. Kennedy. --CSR

Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Top Master Spy, LAKAM Chief Benjamin Blumberg, Tells His Story, And About His Relationship to Arnon Milchan

"Blumberg carried with him a
cyanide capsule to kill himself if he
was ever caught"

Sara Leibowitz – Dar. | 04/07/2012 16:00,  Ma'ariv  

This is the English translation of the original article published in Hebrew, in the Ma'ariv newspaper, one of Israel's oldest and largest daily publications. Note the repeated use of the term "according to foreign sources". This term is used to avoid violating Israeli Defense Ministry censorship regulations, which allows journalists to reveal highly sensitive material only if it legitimately comes from a credible foreign source that has been published. It might also be noted that Benjamin Blumberg is the recipient of Israel's highest defense-related award: The Israel Prize for Defense. It was given to Blumberg in a secret ceremony and has never been publicly revealed. That revelation was apparently removed from this article.

Master spy, Benjamin 'Vered' Blumberg is the most secretive man in Israel. It is not surprising that few have heard his name. His life has been lived in the shadows, those places that no one should know about, and should certainly not know your name.

First public photo ever of Benjamin Blumberg, one of the most
Important Intelligence figures in Israel's History
(photo by Arik Sultan)

________________________________________

Benjamin Blumberg is one of the most important security-related individuals in the history of the country, and apart from senior members of the security establishment, hardly anyone in the country would recognize his name. Yet suddenly now his name is known worldwide, and many romantic terms have been attached to it: "The Prince of Silence", "The Mysterious Agent", and the "Master-Spy ".

All of this publicity does not come naturally for Blumberg who has kept his silence for decades. No interviews and no publicity for the man who stood at the very center of Israel's espionage campaigns. That is until two weeks ago when the FBI released classified documents proving his relationship to Arnon Milchan, the famous Hollywood producer, who was exposed after purchasing sensitive items for Dimona and the nuclear weapons program.

Milchan's operator in Israel, according to those documents, was none other than Benjamin Blumberg, who headed LAKAM (the Science Liaison Bureau), the most secret body in Israeli intelligence networks, which operated from the 1950's until the mid-eighties.

Blumberg, according to foreign sources, was the one who taught the future Hollywood producer, the art of setting up shell companies and secret bank accounts. Blumberg is not really amused by the rare publicity he is receiving. In recent years, he is concerned mostly about his economic problems and not about any grand intelligence operation. "It hurts me that for years I was more worried about the fate of our country than that of my own house," he says in an exclusive interview to Ma'ariv.

Two weeks ago, when the American media mentioned his case, he was busy seeking a bank loan to finance an urgent operation. The bank refused. He took several loans in the past, and at his age, Blumberg is 88, the banks are not confident that he is in a position to pay them back. "I never thought about my personal gain, only for national security, today I regret it," he says.

The Third Man
Shimon Peres, Arnon Milchan and Benjamin Netanyahu in a new conference

(...like 9/11 actors... -- CSR)

Passersby in Tel Aviv do not recognize Blumberg and have no idea who he is, a handsome man, slightly stooped; his hair had turned white long ago. Although Milchan once called him "the third most important person in Israel", Blumberg's picture has never been published, until now.

Many Israelis owe him a great debt. According to foreign reports it was he, through his agents, who obtained the foundations of Israel's most sophisticated defense systems. His LAKAM agents, and often he personally, gathered the equipment, technology and materials that provided Israel's military industries with the technological breakthroughs that have made it one of the most advanced in the world today.

Arnon Milchan, it was claimed, was one of his favorite agents. A recent book featuring Blumberg and Milchan, Confidential - The life of Secret Agent Turned Hollywood Tycoon Arnon Milchan, was written by Meir Doron and Joseph Gelman. The book claims that the now Hollywood producer worked for LAKAM for years, and was one of its most important agents, securing mostly American technology for Israel's nuclear program, and that it was Blumberg and Shimon Peres who recruited Milchan.

For years, the company "Milchan brothers" acquired, according to foreign reports, chemicals and various applications for the Dimona reactor. The Americans, of course, could not sell these products directly to Israel, because Israel had not signed the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, so alternative methods of shipment were invented.

They claim the products were transferred to front companies, and shipped through Germany or France to Israel. Also in the book Critical Mass by William Burroughs and Robert Weindram, Blumberg was noted to be involved in lucrative defense transactions in the United States and else ware, fronted by Hollywood producer Arnon Milchan.

With Milchan and Polanski at the cabaret
Arnon Milchan and his close friend Roman Polanski
took the LAKAM Chief out for an uncomfortable night on the town.

At the request of David Ben Ben Gurion, Blumberg had changed his name to 'Vered', but now he is recognized in the foreign media and Israeli documents simply as "Blumberg ". Blumberg says that he was never involved in buying sensitive products in America, but he says that to this day he fondly remembers Arnon Milchan.

He cannot forget the evening he spent with director Roman Polanski at Milchan's luxurious villa near Paris. Milchan suggested that they all go out for a night on the town at a cabaret. Polanski immediately agreed. Blumberg, the LAKAM Chief was hesitant. "I went with them but after half an hour I wanted to leave. Naked girls were dancing on stage, it's not my taste. I asked Milchan to take me back to the hotel, but we could not move because Polanski was so enthusiastic he refused to go. So I had to spend half the night there watching that. It was horrible. "

Blumberg spent many days, including one Yom Kippur at Milchan's villa in France. "I never saw such luxury, elegance, size." he recalls wistfully. But for some 20 years now, he has not exchanged a word with Milchan. "When I left the LAKAM he severed our relationship," explains Blumberg.

In the mid 1960's it was Shimon Peres who asked Blumberg to meet with Arnon Milchan. "Milchan's father had just died and he inherited a small fertilizer and pesticide company.  Milchan's mother called the company's suppliers and told them not to work with her son because he was not as successful or experienced as his father. I met him [Milchan] and saw a bright young man", recalled Blumberg.

Blumberg was close to the leaders of the Jewish communities in South Africa, European millionaires and of course the heads of Israel's security forces and Israeli politicians, many of whom called him a genius and considered him an extremely capable person who can achieve anything, anywhere in the world.

I bought a plane

One of the many stories in foreign publications tells how LAKAM agents secured the production plans of the French Super-Mirage, after France had declared an embargo on arms shipments to Israel. They bribed a Swiss engineer who worked at the factory that manufactured the Mirage engine.

In better times the LAKAM Chief rubbed elbows with world leaders. He described how he once flew abroad with a certain billionaire trying to close a deal on military equipment. The billionaire was acting as the middleman. "He talked about the profits that the deal will produce for him. I called Milchan and told him that I do not want to work with that man, and I will need a private jet to fly me to the seller directly. Milchan put me in touch with a Hollywood film producer who wanted to sell his plane. So I bought the plane from the producer intending to fly over there and continue the relationship that the man had started, but realized I could not work behind the back of that billionaire. Eventually, Israel Aircraft Industries sold the plane for a profit. "The man [Milchan] did a number of things for the country, I could work with him."

"When I was coming to Washington I would stay with Yitzhak and Leah Rabin at the ambassador's residents. Rabin was always willing to help. I Happened I asked him to arrange a dinner and invite whoever he wants but to also invite a certain person that I needed to work with. He did it without asking a single question."

I was crazy, abnormal

Many plots are only memories now. Blumberg, married with two children, a daughter and a son who is a kibbutz member who is sick and needed emergency surgery. He lives on a pension from the Prime Minister's office, is in debt to the tune of a few tens of thousands of dollars after helping relatives, and for several years cannot escape the economic troubles which have befallen him.

At 88, he lives in a tiny apartment in Tel Aviv, on the third floor without an elevator. He only recently finished paying off the mortgage. The stairwell is neglected and most residents in the building are renters. Senior defense officials who lived in the building have long-since moved on to more luxurious homes, only Blumberg remains.

Doctor's told him that he is forbidden from going down the three flights of stairs too frequently. He has not visited Jerusalem in years and he dreams of seeing the old city and the amphitheater on Mount Scopus. He hasn't even been to the beach, not far from his house, in years.

On good days he walks the streets of Tel Aviv alone, often going to The 'Midina Square', for a cup of coffee in the hope of meeting old acquaintances at random, "although most have already died," he says. Most of the day he is holed up in the bedroom of his tiny apartment. "For years I worked for the country," he says. "I had to think about myself and my family before the State of Israel and its security. While other people took care of themselves, built beautiful houses and saved money, I traveled the world and worried about the country. Today all those former colleagues live well, and I'm in debt".

A few months ago he wrote a letter to his daughter and granddaughters and apologized to them for not taking care of his home. "I never thought of taking care of myself, I was mad, not normal, I worked only for the good of the country, that's why I have no savings, just debt," he explained.

He wrote various committees that examined his medical condition: "From age 16 I have held positions in the defense establishment and took personal risks outside the country, and I neglected to take care of my family. I'm ashamed I have gotten myself into such a situation. I've put all of myself into the security of Israel, but I neglected myself and my home."

I never thought of personal benefit

Earlier this week, as noted, he applied for a loan from a bank to help pay for urgently-needed surgery. With an "HMO I have to wait months. A private doctor will do it much faster, but I have to pay several thousand dollars," says Blumberg.

After a brief consultation, the branch manager decided not to extend the loan. He has already taken a loan and at his age, the manager is not sure he could pay the loan back. In recent years Blumberg has tried to get assistance from various sources, after everything that he contributed to the state, the state declined his request not pay taxes on his paycheck.

"Cutting the 3,000 shekels a month in taxes would help me close the debt and start my life from scratch economically," he says. But Blumberg did not meet the criteria, and his request was denied.

"When I left, the LAKAM offered me to become an arms dealer. I had many contacts all over the world, and I imagine I would've made a lot of money. I refused. I never liked this kind of pursuit of the money. Only one time in all the long years I worked in the defense establishment did I allow myself to take two days off. I spent a whole weekend relaxing. I've always just worked, I never thought about my personal gain. I took the flight, met with the one I needed to meet with and come back home. I was all over the world but did not see a thing, only offices and hotels."

Involved in defense since age 14

In recent months, late at night, he began writing a book in a thick notebook. He describes the operations that he participated in, the dangers which he was exposed to. Due to censorship laws, he is not allowed to document his memories on a computer. He doesn't have one anyway.

"I Keep everything in my head," he says, "I do not need a computer." He forgets certain dates and names of people but fluently recites the words of David Ben Gurion to President John F. Kennedy, in a meeting that Blumberg participated in.

 Blumberg was born in 1923 at Mikveh Israel. His maternal grandfather was a founder of the agricultural school, his father was the manager of the school. "That's one reason for my bad economic situation," he says, "My parents never left me a thing, when they passed away. Even their apartment belonged to the agriculture school of Mikveh Israel."

Security matters flowed in his blood from a very young age, he says. "I was already a squad leader in the Haganah at 14 years of age. At 15 I left home and went to live with the family of Sheikh Zayed Giora. Zeid introduced me to the Druze in the region and thanks to them I learned to speak Arabic."

In the War of Independence in 1948 he fought in the Tiberius region.  After the war he returned to Zaid and he dreamed of becoming a farmer, but Isser Harel, former head of Shin Bet security service asked him to establish the security system within in the defense industries.

"I recruited security officers and established procedures. It started off as a mess. It was not easy and I had to convince the military industry executives that they actually needed security. Tzvi Dar, director of the military industry, told me what the hell, let them steal", he recalls.


Uranium reactor

Blumberg refused to turn to Peres for help

During his time in the Defense Ministry, Blumberg established a special relationship with, and worked very closely with Shimon Peres, who at the time was the Director-General of the Ministry of Defense. When he [Blumberg] ran into his financial difficulties, it was suggested that he contact President Peres for help, but Blumberg refused to reach out to his old colleague Peres on the matter.

However, when President Obama declared that it was time to march towards a world free of nuclear weapons, Blumberg said he considered calling Peres to ask him to crack down on the more talkative ministers in the government who were reacting to that..

It was Shimon Peres who introduced Blumberg to the most closely guarded secret of the State of Israel in the late fifties – the plans to build the Dimona nuclear research complex. In '58, when they started to build the nuclear reactor, according to foreign reports, Blumberg was appointed the lead security officer of the reactor. To this day, in his little bedroom at home, is a painting of the Dimona reactor, a gift from an artist friend.

According to foreign reports, from early on, Israel stepped up its efforts to obtain uranium for the reactor. In November 1968, Blumberg's LAKAM devised a plan, together with the Mossad, to steal 200 tons of natural uranium (yellow cake) from the deck of a cargo ship sailing in the Mediterranean

The ship was carrying the flag of Liberia and was scheduled to reach the port of Genoa. The uranium on board was for a German chemical company acquired by the Belgian company Societe General de binary. The ship never reached Genoa. Journalistic investigations revealed that she had rendezvoused in the Mediterranean with an Israeli cargo ship, and her cargo is claimed to have made it to Israel instead.


Iran - a small and harmless reactor

Until the early eighties, Bloomberg was a significant figure in the security established and was involved in most of the secret operations of that period. He told a close friend that for years he carried with him a cyanide capsule so they he could kill himself if he was every caught. In The Unspoken Alliance, Sasha Polakow-Suransky writes that Blumberg was heavily involved in the security relationship that developed between Israel and South Africa during the 1970's, which included nuclear cooperation.

According Polakow-Suransky, Blumberg wanted to buy hundreds of tons of "yellow cake", a substance needed to begin the uranium enrichment process for nuclear reactors. Blumberg does not confirm his involvement but says he frequently visited South Africa and became friends with Jewish community leaders and even convinced one of them to immigrate to Israel.

"I was not just hanging around. On my very first drive from Pretoria to Johannesburg I saw the way a white rancher beat a black worker with a whip. Later at the hotel I took an elevator that was separate from my luggage because I was not allowed to ride in the same elevator as a black person. It killed me. All that happened there disgusts me, but for the country I was ready to absorb anything," he says.

Despite his age and the fact that for many years now he is not part of the establishment, Blumberg sometimes participates in security discussions, mainly because of his long and deep experience in the nuclear field. "Sometimes, they send me a taxi with a driver who waits for me outside the building until the meeting ends." On the one hand they won't increase my pension, even though I need the money to survive, and on the other hand, spend money on taxis for me. "

He cannot always get to the hearings; "I am a member of another security committee which meets in Tel Aviv," he says, "but a taxi ride costs 25 shekels each way, it is too expensive for me, so I do not go to those discussions. The biggest mistake that Israel is doing is that we're talking about the Iranian nuclear program. This topic is not a topic that should be talked about, he warns. "I do not understand the hysteria over Iran's nuclear reactor, it's small and harmless."

The Firing

Sharon allowed no appeal for Blumberg, but over time developed a close
relationship with Arnon Milchan

Blumberg did not make many friends over his many years as the LAKAM chief. Even though all of the higher ups in the defense establishment knew who he was, he was distant, secretive and all powerful; the true holder of the secrets. He did befriend the poet Natal Alterman, "I enjoyed his genius and consulted with him from time to time."

 In recent years he [Blumberg] is very lonely. His sister died many years ago. His brother, who also worked for the security establishment went blind and lives alone in Holon. "I would like to see him, but I have no way to reach him," says Blumberg. His bitterness stems not only from his economic situation and his loneliness, but by the way that he was let go after so many years of hard work for the country.

In 1977, when the Likud came to power, Deputy Defense Minister Mordechai Tzipori, asked the new Defense Minister, Ezer Weizman, to replace Blumberg with somebody that was identified with the Likud party. Blumberg took his case to newly elected Prime Minister Menachem Begin, and convinced Begin to put a stop to the efforts to fire him. But two years later, in 1981, Ariel Sharon was appointed Defense Minister. Sharon did not show the appreciation for Blumberg that Begin had showed, and replaced him with one of his cronies, Rafi Eitan. More than 20 years of security work ended abruptly, without even a chance to appeal.

"I never even saw Sharon," says Blumberg. "I was driving north to Tel Aviv and on the way I heard on the radio that Sharon plans to replace three senior officials. I had a bad feeling. I stopped by and I called from the pay phone to someone who told me that Sharon had fired me. So that's when I knew I was fired after 40 years of defense work."

"On the one hand, I felt terrible; on the other hand, I felt relief, after so many years I wanted to rest".


There is no fault

Blumberg was still relatively young and determined to work. He became Vice President of a small electronics factory in the town of Migdal Haemek. The Company used laser welding machines to manufacture metals and military electronics.

"When I was looking for investors in the factory, I was offered a meeting with Nahum Manbar, before he was prosecuted. He agreed to invest a half million dollars in the factory, but I decided to give up on his investment. I always operated according to feelings about people and I usually was not mistaken.

In 1998, he retired from the company, and since then passes his days in near total isolation and existential anxiety. In thin plastic bags and worn binders he keeps correspondence with banks the nation insurance company. He knows every document, and each line explaining his accounts.

"I am hurt by the fact that I did so much for the country, and this is how I am treated."

There is no single person at fault in this story; only a single person who contributed so much to the security of the state who now finds himself in difficult circumstances. Earlier this week, Amos Malka, former Military Intelligence Chief, and Giora Eiland, former head of the National Security Council, upon learning of this situation, said that they will try to help Blumberg. "I hope that they will succeed," Blumberg says.  

Posted by Confidential at 7:19 PM

Labels: Arnon Milchan, Benjamin Blumberg, Hollywood, Israel, LAKAM, Shimon Peres

http://amconfidential.blogspot.com/2012 ... y-and.html

Authors Get to Know the Real Arnon Milchan

By Richard Horgan on August 11, 2011 9:30 AM

Next week, a must-read for Hollywood aficionados arrives in bookstores: Confidential: The Life of Secret Agent Turned Hollywood Tycoon Arnon Milchan. Written by brothers-in-law Meir Doron and Joseph Gelman, the Geffen Books release details the incredible transition made by Milchan from international arms dealer to prolific, Oscar nominated movie producer.

Going into the project, the authors realized their subject would take about as kindly to the book as Oprah Winfrey did to Kitty Kelley's recent bio. So they opted for the strategy of writing the book in full, secretly, and then alerting Milchan. Once the book was completed in 2009, it did not take long for the pair to hook up with their subject. Per an essay by the authors on FoxNews.com:

    Milchan requested a series of meetings over the matter, which ended up involving many cigarettes, herbal teas, shots of tequila, and Stella beer. We met his wife Amanda and his new child Shimon (named after Shimon Peres), his butler John, and other friends and family in the casual setting of his Malibu home, the former residence of acclaimed director John Frankenheimer, and the house where Robert Kennedy stayed the night before his assassination at the Ambassador Hotel the following morning.

The revelations in the book are almost too fantastical to believe. They include the idea that Milchan has fronted secret offshore accounts that have financed Isaeli intelligence activities, funded cultural events in Poland with the help of Roman Polanski, and been a key provider of nuclear technology for his country. In the end, Milchan paved the way for the authors to get in touch with all sorts of other people, everyone from Sumner Redstone and former Warner Bros. exec Terry Semel to a longtime lover of Milchan's.

http://www.mediabistro.com/fishbowlla/a ... oks_b35740

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Mark Dankof's Final Word on Michael Collins Piper's Final Judgment on Israel and the Assassination of JFK

Mark Dankof on Press TV: Piper is correct in his Final Judgment on Israel and the JFK Assassination

     I told an international television audience on Press TV/Iran this past Friday  that Michael Collins Piper's book, Final Judgment, on the Israeli Mossad links to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy is absolutely compelling, not simply in terms of unraveling the truth about what happened to America's 35th President, but seeing the bigger picture surrounding false flags, governmental and media corruption, and how a linear line of development may be clearly drawn from the USS Maine and Lusitania incidents, Pearl Harbor, and the Kennedy killing in Dallas in 1963, to the events a decade ago in New York City propagandized ad nauseam yesterday on the 10th anniversary of 9-11 by everyone from the American Legion to the National Football League.

     And as noted some years ago, Israeli nuclear dissident Mordechai Vanunu agrees with Piper's thesis, and has said so publicly.  Vanunu's endorsement of the thesis may go a long way toward explaining his continued detention in Israel, perhaps more so than the revelations provided to the Sunday Times of London years ago about the Zionist State's nuclear weaponry and operations at Dimona.

     Three official endorsements of Final Judgment will suffice here as an indication of the quality of Michael Collins Piper's research, his analysis, and the inexorable conclusions drawn from both.

     Endorsement One (Dr. Herbert L. Calhoun, Ph. D., who retired as deputy division chief of the Policy, Plans, and Analysis Office of the State Department's Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, and who formerly served as a senior foreign affairs specialist for the U. S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.  He was the American representative to the 1996 and 1998 United Nations Group of Governmental Experts on Small Arms and Light Weapons.  Dated March 10, 2003):

"As one who has read over 200 books on the JFK assassination, and engaged in research both as an individual and as part of various teams, I can say without fear of contradiction that Piper's book is now the definitive work on the JFK assassination.  Final Judgment is the most thorough, most honest, most penetrating, most factual, and most analytically complete and systematic of all that I have read so far."

The view of the Grassy Knoll Gunman on November 22, 1963. Did the Mossad and a Renegade Element in the French OAS Provide the Rifle Team? Mark Dankof photo in Dallas, September 1st, 2010.

     Endorsement Two:  (Colonel Donn De Grand Pre, who served as Deputy Chief of the International Division/Office of the Chief of Research and Development at the Pentagon.  In 1967, Grand Pre was named as Director for Ground Weapons Systems in the newly-created office of International Logistics Negotiations, responsible for negotiating sales contracts with heads of foreign nations for military weapons systems.  On September 30, 1979, The Washington Post Magazine wrote about Grand Pre, citing his expertise:  "If you had been a Middle Eastern ruler in the 1970s in search of American weapons systems, you would have called Donn de Grand Pre, Pentagon arms peddler."):

"Piper's Final Judgment is brilliant.  . . .  Several high-level military officers believed that the killing of JFK was in fact a coup d'etat carried out by elements of the CIA working with the Israeli Mossad.  Kennedy was attempting to halt the development of nuclear weapons by the Israelis, while simultaneously planning to disband the CIA and disengage our military troops from the Indo-China area.  Read Final Judgment by Michael Collins Piper for more details. [Citing Final Judgment in Grand Pre's own book, Barbarians Inside the Gates]"

     Endorsement Three (Mark Dankof, ex-Republican Party activist, year 2000 Constitution Party candidate for the U. S. Senate in Delaware, and investigative print and broadcast journalist):

     "Having read all of the major Kennedy Assassination literature from Mark Lane's Rush to Judgment and Josiah Thompson's Six Seconds in Dallas to Anthony Summers's Conspiracy, Jim Marrs' Crossfire, and Gerald Posner's Case Closed, I can say definitively that Michael Collins Piper's Final Judgment is the Final Word on what happened to America's 35th President.

     "Piper's magnum opus accomplishes many things at many levels.  First, he studiously avoids tiresome repristination of ancient arguments about ballistics and the lone gunman controversy already covered in dozens of works on the Kennedy tragedy.  Second, he demonstrates conclusively that David Ben Gurion and his agents in the American Jewish Lobby were in serious subterranean warfare with JFK over Dimona, the burgeoning Israeli militarization of their nuclear program, and the President's insistence that the Zionist State submit to international inspection of both.  In this regard Mr. Piper acquaints the reader with the copious research on this long-suppressed subject undertaken by Stephen Green in Taking Sides, Andrew and Leslie Cockburn in Dangerous Liaison, and Seymour Hersh in The Samson Option.

"Perhaps most critically, Piper takes the outstanding research of Anthony Summers in Conspiracy on the elements of the CIA, organized crime, and the anti-Castro Cuban exile movement demonstrably involved in the events of November of 1963 in Dealey Plaza, and proceeds to show how all of these groups, individuals, activities, and associations were in fact, involved, but under the direction of Israeli intelligence; Meyer Lansky, Jewish organized crime chieftain with a direct line to Ben Gurion and Israeli intelligence; PERMINDEX; and James Jesus Angleton, the longtime director of counterintelligence for the CIA who simultaneously served as CIA liaison chief to the Mossad.  The incredible details of Final Judgment even include the Israeli Haganah gun running links of Oswald assassin Jack Ruby and Frank Sturgis, anti-Castro CIA operative with links to Watergate in the 1970, and the role of Jewish mobster Mickey Cohen in introducing Jack Kennedy to Marilyn Monroe–at the direction of Meyer Lansky and Menachem Begin.  . . .

     "Final Judgment even indicates what is behind much of the disinformation on the assassination disseminated in film and books, including the ominous implications of Mossad agent and Israel arms merchant, Arnon Milchan, being the financial angel of Oliver Stone's movie, JFK.

     "After reading Final Judgment, no American will ever look at the American-Israeli relationship in the same way again, or fail to see the implications of the events in Dallas almost 50 years ago for the present tragedy of the Israeli-driven American military involvements in the Middle East; Israeli infiltration of the American media, Congress, and National Security State; or the insanity of the Zionist State's attempts to involve the United States in an unjustifiable war with Iran.

     "It begs yet another question:  What was Israel's real involvement in 9-11?"

     The clock is ticking.  Decent Americans, Iranians and all indigenous peoples of the Middle East and Central Asia, and people everywhere who oppose the New World Order must unite while we still can.

     And action presupposes the assimilation of the correct information and the will to act upon it.  That process begins with acquiring and reading Michael Collins Piper's Final Judgment.  That is my Final Word today.

Written by Mark Dankof

September 12, 2011 at 7:41 pm
http://mark1marti2.wordpress.com/tag/arnon-milchan/

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

This book only indicates to me that the J-Tribers have been washing dope money through Hollywood Films to help finance Jew budgets in Israel (military and otherwise).

New Book Recounts Tale of Israeli Agent at Home in Hollywood

Hugh Hamilton for The New York Times
Meir Doron, left, and Joseph Gelman wrote a book on Arnon Milchan, which says he at one point sold nuclear-triggering devices.
By MICHAEL CIEPLY
July 17, 2011

LOS ANGELES — "Never, never tell jokes about a man with easy access to weapons of mass destruction," Peter Chernin, a former News Corporation official, once light-heartedly warned of Arnon Milchan, who has long tantalized Hollywood with his dual identity as a producer of popular movies and a businessman tied to the arms industry.

Chris Pizzello/Associated Press
Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie with Arnon Milchan, a producer of "Mr. and Mrs. Smith."
Mr. Chernin may have been even more right than he knew.

"Confidential: The Life of Secret Agent Turned Hollywood Tycoon Arnon Milchan," written by Meir Doron and Joseph Gelman, and set for publication on July 30 by Gefen Books, now holds that Mr. Milchan — whose credits include "Love and Other Drugs" and "Knight and Day" — at least through the mid-1980s was a full-fledged operative for Israel's top-secret intelligence agency, Lakam. (The acronym is from the Hebrew for the blandly named Science Liaison Bureau.)

In that capacity, according to the book, Mr. Milchan supervised government-backed accounts and front companies that financed "the special needs of the entirety of Israel's intelligence operations outside the country."

The "special needs" serviced by Mr. Milchan, who is now 66 years old, included buying components to build and maintain Israel's nuclear arsenal. But with the indictment in 1985 of Richard Kelly Smyth, an aerospace executive who had made illegal shipments of nuclear triggers through Milchan companies, Mr. Milchan unexpectedly found his arms-dealing in the news even as he was wrangling with Universal Pictures over the near collapse of a movie, "Brazil," directed by Terry Gilliam.

Mr. Smyth became a fugitive. He was finally arrested in 2001, convicted and imprisoned. He was released on probation in 2005.

Mr. Milchan was not accused of wrongdoing, but the case drew scrutiny to his activities in the arms business even as he stepped up his film career under deals first at Warner Brothers, then at 20th Century Fox, whose parent company bought a stake in his Regency Enterprises. In the glow of friendships with the likes of Brad Pitt and Robert De Niro, speculation about his intrigues seemed to fade — until a pair of unlikely biographers decided to figure out why Israel had been filtering a large part of its military budget through Hollywood hands.

Mr. Doron spoke recently over coffee at a patio cafe here, expressing puzzlement at Israel's reliance on a middleman to broker deals that seemingly could have been made without the services of his Milchan Brothers umbrella company and affiliates.

He was flanked by Mr. Gelman, who sipped watermelon juice, and joined in explaining how the two — who are brothers-in-law — conceived of writing about Mr. Milchan, who had been vaguely identified in Israel's press as the "Chuck Norris of the Lakam." Mr. Gelman, who was born in the United States, had lived in Israel and served as a paratrooper during the 1982 war in Lebanon. Mr. Doron had been a writer and editor specializing in Israeli military issues.

Never having written together, they began culling public records and published accounts. Eventually, they met Mr. Smyth, who was by then living in Lompoc, Calif., and, with his story in hand, cobbled together a draft of their book before approaching Mr. Milchan.

"Should I be concerned?" Mr. Milchan asked during a first conversation by phone in 2009, Mr. Gelman said. A major worry, Mr. Gelman told him, was the impression that he had profited hugely from Israel's security dilemmas.

"I did it for my country, the money did not go to me," Mr. Gelman recalled Mr. Milchan explaining, when the three later met, and began a series of sessions that went on for six months.

Mr. Milchan's disclaimer about profiteering provoked further research into how various companies set up by Mr. Milchan or associated with Milchan Brothers traded in arms for Israel and other countries. While doing so, he set aside money in accounts for use by Israel, allowing that country's prime minister "to execute decisions beyond Israel's borders without the need for the formal budgeting, cabinet approvals, petty internal politics, or leaks to the press that might endanger the operation."

In the end, the book was not authorized by Mr. Milchan. The account was based partly on interviews with the likes of Shimon Peres, the Israeli president who, according to the book, acknowledged having "recruited" Mr. Milchan as a clandestine operative.

"Confidential" was sold to Gefen Publishing by David Kuhn, a literary agent who was previously an editor at Brill's Content and The New Yorker. Its narrative follows Mr. Milchan through his first acquaintance with the arms business via his father's company, through his introduction to Israel's nuclear program by Mr. Peres and the Lakam chief, Benjamin Blumberg.

After the 1973 Yom Kippur war, Mr. Milchan began acquiring both big-ticket conventional weapons and krytrons, devices that can trigger nuclear bombs. In the middle of it all, he was introduced to the film business by Elliott Kastner, now deceased, the American producer with whom he collaborated on a 1977 picture, "The Stick-Up."

Mr. Milchan thought the movie bad enough to remove his credit but he immediately backed another film, "Black Joy," that appeared at the Cannes Film Festival. By the early 1980s, Mr. Milchan was a force in Hollywood, with a growing string of credits on films like "The King of Comedy" and "Once Upon a Time in America," both with Mr. De Niro — and the movies soon became not just convenient cover, but a full-blown second career.

In the late 1990s, the News Corporation, which owns Fox, paid $200 million for a 20 percent stake in Mr. Milchan's Regency Enterprises. A News Corporation spokeswoman, Teri Everett, had no immediate response to a query about the company's reason for backing Mr. Milchan, and about any reaction by its chief executive, Rupert Murdoch, to revelations in the new book. (Mr. Milchan's latest film for Fox, the comedy "Monte Carlo," opened to soft reviews and modest prospects a few weeks ago.)

Asked whether Mr. Milchan would discuss the book, his executive assistant, Jane Bulmer, said he was traveling and out of reach. But, Ms. Bulmer said in an e-mail, Mr. Milchan had told her "that he has not read the book and does not plan on commenting on any unauthorized books that have been written about him."

As for Mr. Milchan's current status with Israeli intelligence, Mr. Gelman and Mr. Doron declined to venture a guess. "We really don't know with certainty," Mr. Gelman said.

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

A page from Hersh's book "The Samson Option".  Blumberg likely "managed" agent Zalman Shapiro below like he did Arnon Milchan later:

-------

THE SAMSON OPTION:  ISRAEL'S NUCLEAR ARSENAL AND AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY

Chapter 18:  Injustice

Carl Duckett's top-secret CIA estimate in 1968 that Israel had three or four nuclear bombs was primarily based on his conviction that an American Jew named Zalman Shapiro had smuggled more than two hundred pounds of enriched uranium into Israel-enough for four bombs. The alleged smuggled uranium also was a major factor in Duckett's second estimate, in '974, that credited Israel with at least ten bombs; it was based on the amount of uranium he believed Shapiro had diverted plus a guess that the technicians at Dimona could have chemically separated enough plutonium from the reactor to have produced six weapons or more since '970. Just how Israel would accomplish that feat without a chemical reprocessing plant-the CIA still had no proof that such a plant existed in Israel-was not clear, but what was clear was Shapiro's culpability. To Duckett and his colleagues, especially Richard Helms, the case against Shapiro was unassailable.

In the CIA's view, Shapiro was more than just a Jew who supported Israel; he was a Jew in the nuclear-fuel-processing business who traveled regularly to Israel and was a partner with the Israeli government in some business ventures. He fit the dual-loyalty stereotype in many other ways: he was the high-achieving son of an Orthodox rabbi who emigrated from Lithuania; he was valedictorian of his high school class in Passaic, New Jersey, before attending Johns Hopkins University; he got a master's degree while going to night school; and-with the aid of a fellowship from Standard Oil of Indiana-he earned his doctorate in chemistry in 1948, at the age of twenty-eight. Shapiro, with his brilliance and capacity for hard work, was among the first scientists-and most certainly one of the first Jews-to be hired to develop submarine reactors for a newly established laboratory operated by the Westinghouse Electric Corporation for the U.S. Navy.

As his career progressed, Shapiro--who underwent rigorous national security checks while at Westinghouse-made no secret of his strong commitment to Israel; some of his family had been victims of the Nazis, and he believed in the need for an independent Jewish state. He became an active member of the Zionist Organization of America and also generously supported the American Technion Society, which raises funds and  rovides equipment to the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel's most advanced school of science and engineering.

In 1957, he organized a publicly owned nuclear fuel processing firm, with at least twenty-five stockholders, in an abandoned World War II steel plant in Apollo, Pennsylvania, twenty-five miles northeast of Pittsburgh. The firm, known as the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (NUMEC), was a small company in a nuclear-fuel-processing world that was dominated by Fortune 500 firms; there was a constant struggle to get contracts. Shapiro was aggressive in the pursuit of work for his young company, and by the early 1960s NUMEC was providing nuclear services for at least nine foreign countries. There was a steady stream of foreign visitors to the factory, many at the instigation of the Department of Commerce and the State Department, which were eager to show off the government's Atoms for Peace effort. There were at least three foreign employees at NUMEC, including an Israeli metallurgist assigned to unclassified breeder reactor fuel research. There also was constant back-and-forth in those years between AEC security officials and NUMEC over the handling of classified materials, and the company was required to improve its procedures.

In 1965, after years of internal audits and reviews, an AEC inspection team determined that more than two hundred pounds of enriched uranium that had been supplied by Westinghouse and the Navy to NUMEC for processing and fabrication could not be accounted for; eventually the Joint Atomic Energy Committee-as well as the CIA-came to suspect that Shapiro had diverted the uranium to Israel.

Shapiro would be hounded by those suspicions for the next twenty-five years-although the most significant evidence against him seemed to be his Jewishness and the fact that one of the major investors in NUMEC shared his support for Israel. A number of experienced investigators from the government and the Congress, as well as dozens of journalists, assumed that Shapiro's emotional tie to Israel was enough of a motive for him to commit nuclear espionage, a crime punishable by death under the Atomic Energy Act.

Despite more than ten years of intensive investigation involving active FBI surveillance, however, no significant evidence proving that Shapiro had diverted any uranium from his plant was ever found. Nonetheless, he remained guilty in the minds of many in the government and the press; reporters invariably included an account of Shapiro's ties to Israel and the alleged NUMEC diversion in any story about the development of nuclear arms in Israel. Some of the newspaper and book accounts did note that the charges against Shapiro were never proved; many others simply declared that it was the Shapiro uranium that gave Israel the nuclear bomb.

Zalman Shapiro did not divert uranium from his processing plant to Israel, but there is little solace for the nuclear industry in that fact: the missing uranium was not stolen at all-it ended up in the air and water of the city of Apollo as well as in the ducts, tubes, and floors of the NUMEC plant. There is little solace, too, for the American intelligence community in Shapiro's noninvolvement with nuclear diversion, for it failed to learn of Shapiro's close ties to Ernst David Bergmann and Binyamin Blumberg and the sensitive-and legitimate-mission he did conduct for his beloved Israel.

***

Shapiro's business was not a pretty one: many of NUMEC's contracts involved the chemical isolation and recovery of enriched uranium from the dirt and scrap generated in fabricating nuclear fuel. The scrap was chemically treated -- sometimes two or three times-in an attempt to isolate the salvageable uranium. The process inherently generated some loss; small amounts of enriched uranium were constantly being flushed out in waste water or lodged in scrub brushes, air vents, filtration systems, cleaning pads, and air masks. It was the kind of work NUMEC's larger and more solidly financed competitors did not want. Other NUMEC contracts involved cleaner work, such the conversion of highly enriched uranium (93 percent U-235) from gaseous uranium hexafluoride-the form in which it was shipped from the government's huge uranium diffusion plants-into uranium oxide powder capable of being fabricated into nuclear fuel for Navy reactors. That process, too, created waste -- as much as 10 to 15 percent of the uranium eventually ended up as scrap and needed to be recovered. Since working with weapons-grade material was exceedingly dangerous, NUMEC had to divide the uranium being processed into small lots -- creating more opportunity for waste -- to guard against the horrible possibility of setting off a chain reaction. Under the stringent AEC rules governing the reprocessing of weapons- grade uranium and plutonium, Shapiro's firm was responsible and had to pay enormous penal. ties for any enriched materials that could not be accounted for  -- as much as $10 a gram; each missing pound thus meant a loss of more than $4,500.

The term MUF, for "material unaccounted for," became a common one in the nuclear processing industry. Making the contractors pay for missing materials also was the backbone of the AEC's safeguards program; the assumption was that no reprocessing firm would divert or steal uranium if it resulted in a stiff fine.

The AEC eventually worked out complicated rules for ac counting for MUF that enabled private firms such as NUMEC to estimate in their regular reports how much missing but ac countable uranium was believed to be in a plant's air filtration system or buried in its waste pits. NUMEC would routinely report seemingly huge losses of enriched materials on any given contract-thirty or forty pounds was not unusual-and then estimate that 80 percent or more of the lost materials would be recovered upon cleanup. The AEC accepted such estimates as realistic, and deferred the assessments of any penalties.

The fact that nuclear waste was considered an inevitable byproduct of the business, just as sawmills produce sawdust, was not really a secret-it was just one of those facts that the public did not need to know, and especially so as the nation became increasingly sensitized to the. environmental costs of the nuclear industry. The enriched materials handled by the workers at NUMEC were not "hot," as commonly understood, for they had not yet been irradiated in a reactor and thus did not emit penetrating and lethal radiation. The danger facing the NUMEC employees came from breathing in or otherwise ingesting uranium, which, like all heavy metals, accumulates in bones, where it eventually impacts on bone marrow, causing leukemia. Enriched uranium, if breathed into the lungs, also could trigger lung cancer, and the NUMEC employees were constantly urged to wear face masks, although many refused to do so in the summer.

Zalman Shapiro's career-destroying problems began in 1962, when he was the low bidder for two complicated Westinghouse contracts, involving the processing of more than 2,500 pounds of enriched uranium. NUMEC was assured by Westinghouse that 60 percent or more of each hundred kilograms of uranium could successfully be processed-meaning that as much as 40 percent of the uranium would be scrap, to be separately recovered. In fact, NUMEC found that the process was far more difficult than Westinghouse had claimed for one of the contracts, and resulted in only a 35 percent yield of acceptable product. Nearly two thirds of the Westinghouse-supplied uranium ended up as scrap, much of it-so Shapiro and his associates thought-eventually buried in barrels, along with contaminated rags and other cleaning equipment, in two huge waste pits on the NUMEC grounds. The pits included contaminated waste not only from the Westinghouse contract but from other processing jobs for private companies; Shapiro had not isolated the scrap from each of his contracts, as the AEC demanded. AEC investigators subsequently became convinced that Shapiro had deliberately commingled the scrap from different contracts as a money-saving bookkeeping measure. Shapiro also angered the AEC by his reluctance -- again for pocketbook reasons-to begin the time-consuming job of reprocessing the scrap to extract the missing uranium; he instead kept his employees at work on new processing contracts, for which there would be immediate payment. Stalling the AEC inspection teams, which were demanding that the missing uranium be accounted for, one way or another, became a way of life at NUMEC.

***

The AEC tried to resolve the complicated mess in a series of extensive negotiations in 1964 and 1965, with Shapiro constantly citing NUMEC's precarious financial condition to justify his actions. Portions of the 1963 waste pit eventually were dug up, and AEC inspectors found that the amount of enriched uranium buried there was not nearly enough to match the huge losses. The inspectors concluded that there was a MUF of 93.8 kilograms (206 pounds) of enriched uranium; they also told headquarters that because of NUMEC's "inadequate and incomplete accounting records," a diversion could not be ruled out, although there was "no evidence" that a diversion had taken place. The issue was aired at a special meeting in February 1966 of the AEC commissioners and senior staff, and, according to a declassified transcript of that meeting, the commissioners agreed that NUMEC's employees be interviewed to find out what had  happened. It was further agreed that a trip would have to be taken to Capitol Hill to inform the Joint Atomic Energy Committee of the loss.

The report to Congress was a bombshell. The American nuclear community already had been rocked in October 1964 upon learning that China's first nuclear bomb had been triggered by uranium, and not plutonium, as the CIA and other intelligence agencies had widely anticipated. There was immediate suspicion that China had somehow bought on the black market-or stolen-the enriched uranium for its bomb (the CIA would not learn for another year or so that China had completed a huge diffusion plant much earlier than expected). A special study into AEC safeguards was commissioned, and it questioned the commission's heavy reliance on financial penalties as a sufficient bar against nuclear diversion. The Joint Committee's report noted that the AEC's position seemed to be that all of its responsibility "had been fulfilled as long as material was paid for."

The AEC, sensitive to the diversion issue, had referred the NUMEC losses to the FBI in October 1965, but the FBI saw no basis for an investigation; its senior counterintelligence officials concluded, according to declassified documents, that "this situation up to now has been rightfully treated by AEC as an administration matter and there appears to be no basis for us to take any action. . . ." An AEC inspection team eventually interviewed more than 120 employees at NUMEC. No evidence of a diversion was established.

***

The CIA, nonetheless, found Shapiro's long-standing ties to Israel to be of continuing interest. Shapiro was a frequent visitor to Israel, and Israelis were among the many foreign visitors who had registered for tours of NUMEC. Shapiro also was a partner with the Israeli government in a business involving the pasteurization of food and the sterilization of medical supplies by irradiation; packages to and from NUMEC were being shipped out of and into Israel. By late 1966, although reports of Israel's progress in nuclear weaponry began to flow from the American embassy in Tel Aviv, John Hadden, the CIA station chief, was still unable to find proof that Israel had a chemical reprocessing plant at Dimona. And without such a plant, Israel would have needed an independent source of enriched uranium or plutonium to manufacture the bombs that, so Hadden's informants told him, existed.

Duckett and Helms shared Hadden's view that Shapiro had to have been the source for the Israeli progress in nuclear weaponry; the two men would spend the next few years pushing their suspicions on anybody-including Presidents Johnson and Nixon-who would listen. They were mesmerized by Shapiro's links to Israel and the fact that one of the initial stockholders in NUMEC, David Lowenthal, had helped bring illegal immigrants into Israel before 1948. Duckett even came to believe, as he later told congressional investigators, that NUMEC had been set up in 1957 by Shapiro as part of a long-range Israeli intelligence scheme to divert uranium. Duckett and Helms were supported in most of their suspicions by George F. Murphy, assistant staff director of the Joint Atomic Energy Committee, who also was convinced that the two hundred pounds of enriched uranium could not simply have disappeared into NUMEC's refuse pits and air ducts. Murphy, who had no technical understanding of the nuclear fuel cycle, found Shapiro's alleged sloppy bookkeeping, as reported by the AEC, to be preposterous: in his view, "Shapiro was the sharpest, hardest-headed businessman I've ever known." Murphy also was appalled by what he considered to be a lack of security at  UMEC and told a congressional investigator of seeing uranium pellets scattered "all over the benches" during a visit to the Apollo plant. The possibility of a diversion to Israel seemed solid, and Shapiro was put under FBI surveillance in the late 1960s.

Shapiro, meanwhile, in a desperate effort to save his company, hired James E. Lovett, a senior AEC scientist, to take over nuclear materials accountability at NUMEG One of Lovett's first acts was to insist that the concrete floor of the old plant be protected with stainless steel; concrete, Lovett knew, absorbed far more uranium than suspected. Shapiro and other company officials "were deluding themselves," Lovett recalled. "They honestly thought that if it came down to the end, they'd recover most" of the two hundred or more pounds of missing uranium in NUMEC's waste pits. But most of the uranium was not in the plant's waste pits; it was embedded in the concrete floor, clinging to ventilation ducts, flushed out with other plant wastes into the local waterways, and scattered in the air.

The continuing controversy over the alleged diversion became widely known inside the tight-knit nuclear community, and Shapiro suffered. "I was a smelly dead fish," he bitterly recalled. "Contracts were pulled away and given to others." In 1967, Shapiro and his partners were forced to merge their interest in NUMEC into the Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO); Shapiro, with his special Q-clearance (for atomic energy matters) still intact, continued to run the plant.

Shapiro, as the CIA and AEC never learned, did have a secret life. He had met and befriended many of Israel's senior nuclear scientists on his visits there, and was especially devoted to Ernst David Bergmann, who was head of Israel's Atomic Energy Commission until 1966. "He was a genius," Shapiro said of Bergmann. "He was a genius's genius. He worked night and day. I don't know when he slept." Bergmann was especially interested in a nuclear-powered water desalinization plant, Shapiro said.

Water, of course, was the most precious of commodities in Israel. In 1964, the country completed a 150-mile conduit, known as the National Water Carrier, to bring water from the north to the Negev. The system, then Israel's largest development project, linked local and regional water conduits to form an integrated network that sought to capture all of the nation's rainfall and channel it into reservoirs. The National Water Carrier was not completed, however, without a series of disputes with Syria, especially over Israel's goal of bringing water south from Lake Kinneret in Galilee. There were huge stretches in northern Israel where water being moved to the south was in the open, protected only by fencing; the waterway was an obvious target for terrorists. El Fatah, the Arab guerrilla group (and later an important member of the Palestine Liberation Organization), boasted that it would poison the water. At one point, Israeli security officials suspected that El Fatah had attempted to cut the fence protecting the water works in what was feared to be an effort to plant a bomb.

It was at this point that Zalman Shapiro was asked by Israel to devise a rapid and accurate method of determining whether water had been contaminated with toxic materials. There was a second problem: as much as 30 percent of the water was disappearing while traveling to the south, and Israeli officials were unable to determine where and how the loss was taking place. Shapiro acknowledged, reluctantly, that he also advised on that issue, eventually recommending that a radioactive tracer be added to the water in Lake Kinneret to monitor the flow. He had decided not to discuss specifically all of his activities on behalf of Israel during the many government and congressional investigations into NUMEC, he said, because of the continued threat to the Israeli water supply: "I didn't want to put any ideas into people's minds."

In the late 1960s, Shapiro convened a series of meetings -- some in his home -- of American scientists and Israelis to dis cuss, he said, the issue of how to protect the National Water Carrier from potential terrorists. Some of the sessions, considered prima facie suspect by Duckett and his colleagues, were monitored by the FBI. At the time, NUMEC was under contract to provide to Israel specialized small power sources, whose function Shapiro refused to spell out, other than to acknowledge that they were linked to the security of the waterways. All of the items shipped were approved by the Commerce Department for export, he said. "We had permits for what we did. I never transmitted any documents to anybody," he insisted. "The meetings pertained only to the water supply."

Shapiro would not say whether he knew-as did many American scientists--of the work being done at Dimona. He did acknowledge an acquaintanceship with Binyamin Blumberg, the director of Israel's Science Liaison Bureau: "I never said I didn't know him." But he denied revealing any American secrets or diverting any materials. "I worked my butt off to assure the security of this country-do you think for a moment I'd do anything to impair its security?"

***

Duckett and Helms remained convinced that Shapiro was guilty of espionage. Duckett's conversation with Edward Teller and his early-I968 estimate of Israeli nuclear capacity led Helms to urge the FBI to renew its investigation into Shapiro's dealings with Israel. The FBI's J. Edgar Hoover was then in the midst of a bitter dispute with James Angleton's counterintelligence shop over the CIA's handling of defectors, as well as the continuing-and illegal-CIA spying inside the United States under a presidential mandate to determine whether the anti-Vietnam War movement was being directed by Moscow. Hoover chose to spar with Helms over the Shapiro issue for the next year, according to a former congressional investigator who has reviewed the Senate and House intelligence committees' files on Shapiro. "The CIA was saying to Hoover," the investigator recalled, "'You're responsible for counterintelligence in America. Investigate Shapiro, and if he's a spy, catch him.' Hoover's answer was, 'We don't really know if anything's been taken. Go to Israel and get inside Dimona, and if you find  it [evidence of the Shapiro uranium], let us know.' It was kind of a game," the investigator added. "The memos were hysterical- they went back and forth."

(Angleton was a Cypto-Jew working for Israel....--CSR)

***

The NUMEC file remained buried, with Shapiro again working for 'Westinghouse, until 1975, when James H. Conran, an analyst in the Nuclear Regulation Commission (NRC), one of two new agencies that had been formed when the AEC was dissolved earlier in the year, was assigned to write a history of nuclear safeguards. He was denied access to the NUMEC file on grounds of security, and began a fervid campaign to get a briefing on NUMEC for the five NRC commissioners and their immediate staffs. He could not write his report, he said, unless he got that file.

There was another significant issue at stake: the nuclear power industry was pushing hard to get public and government support for a huge plutonium recycling industry. It seemed as if the future of nuclear power now depended on public acceptance of fast breeder reactors capable of generating more plutonium fuel than they consumed. The public policy issue was obvious: how could the world's governments prevent the diversion of plutonium for military use? Bringing up the NUMEC issue once again created a very much unwanted dilemma: either there had been a diversion, or the inherent loss of plutonium and uranium at processing facilities such as NUMEC -- and there were many scattered across the nation -- was far higher than publicly understood.

The advocates of nuclear power, who included many in the NRC, shuddered at the prospect of more adverse publicity about nuclear reactor safety and possible widespread contamination. Antinuclear groups were being organized around the world and had begun large, and sometimes violent, demonstrations in an effort to halt nuclear power.

Conran's insistence on determining what had happened to the missing uranium at NUMEC won him few friends, therefore, inside the NRC. A high-level briefing by Carl Duckett was arranged to discuss the possibility of a diversion. Victor Gilinsky, then an NRC commissioner, recalled Duckett's presentation as matter-of-fact: "Basically, Duckett was asked [about an Israeli bomb] and said the CIA thought Israel had nuclear weapons and the Agency thought there was a diversion.  e didn't say anything that would convince you that was the case-but the issue from our point, our little world, is that he said what he did. We [the NRC commissioners] did not have responsibility for dealing with the Israelis-we take what other agencies think as a starting point." Gilinsky's contention was that the NRC had no obligation to determine whether Duckett's assertions were correct, but it agreed on the basis of what Duckett said to tighten up procedures for dealing with nuclear materials. Most of those at the Duckett briefing "were not involved in foreign affairs," Gilinsky noted. "They were protecting the notion that the NRC's procedures were adequate to protect plutonium. It was a threat to our claims that you could protect the stuff."

Duckett's briefing to the NRC and his subsequent informal talk at the CIA before the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Association, while ruinous to his career, did provoke another brief flurry of concern over NUMEC at the  Ford White House-yet another investigation of Shapiro was nitiated. Once again, however, the FBI could find no evidence of a diversion.

There was independent evidence, moreover, demonstrating that Shapiro's problems in operating NUMEC were not as exceptional as the AEC had publicly indicated in the mid-1960s. A continuing NRC investigation of the plant, which had been taken over in the early 1970s by Babcock & Wilcox, one of the nation's major reactor designers, concluded that another 198 pounds of enriched uranium was missing over a twenty-nine-month period beginning in April 1974. Further study showed that more than no pounds could be accounted for by what the NRC study called previously "unidentified and undocumented loss mechanisms"-such as the contamination of workers' clothing, losses from scrubber systems, material embedded in the flooring, and residual deposits in the processing equipment. The remaining lost uranium was attributed to "inevitable uncertainties in the measurement system and errors in the accounting system." In other words, uranium loss is hard to measure. The high volume of lost uranium raised obvious pollution questions for the immediate area; the Apollo facility had been discharging an average of 13,300 gallons of water and waste effluents daily into the nearby Kiskiminetas River, a tributary of the Allegheny River, which is the main source of drinking water for several communities in the Pittsburgh area. [1]

In October 1977, Jody Powell, President Jimmy Carter's press secretary, publicly announced that "four years of continuing investigation" by the AEC, FBI, and General Accounting Office had "failed to reveal" a diversion of uranium to Israel. By the end of the year the NUMEC case was being actively pursued by the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, one of the most competent and aggressive investigative units in the Congress, as well as the House Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment. Carl Duckett and John Hadden, both retired from the CIA, cooperated fully with the subcommittees; at one point, Duckett telephoned an investigator in the middle of the night and insisted that he go to a pay telephone at a gas station to return the call. He then urged that the investigation into Shapiro be carried forward. Hadden, meanwhile, was repeatedly suggesting that the Israeli government had to have a "mole"-a clandestine operative-inside the Atomic Energy Commission who had protected Shapiro in the early investigations of a possible diversion.

There was little due process for Shapiro in all of this. The subcommittee investigators seemed to take everyone of Duckett's and Hadden's claims at face value. But it is through those claims that outsiders can begin to understand how the CIA and the two congressional subcommittees weighed evidence and what kind of internal checks and balances were imposed on their investigations.

Duckett's beliefs were most directly expressed in a 1981 ABC television interview, when he said there had been a "clear consensus" inside the CIA that the "most likely case" was that Israel had become a nuclear power because of uranium  supplied by Shapiro. "I certainly believe that to be the case.... I believe that all of my senior analysts who worked on the problem agreed with me fully," Duckett said. The subcommittee investigators had no way of knowing, of course, how little Duckett and his "senior analysts" had been able to learn about the Israeli nuclear arsenal. The subcommittees also did not know that Duckett's initial estimate of Israeli nuclear capability was primarily based on an assertion to that effect by Edward Teller, and not on any specific intelligence about the capacity of the Israeli reactor or the established existence of a chemical reprocessing plant at Dimona. There also was no specific evidence linking Shapiro to the delivery of enriched  ranium to Israel. Nor did the subcommittees realize that Duckett's 1974 CIA estimate was not without its critics at the time. Intelligence officials at the Atomic Energy Commission insisted that a footnote be added to the estimate pointing out that "any information" about a diversion of uranium to Israel was unknown to the commission. "Duckett pushed real hard inside the USIB [United States Intelligence Board] to incorporate Israel and Apollo" in the special estimate, one AEC official recalled, "and it got in there."

Nonetheless, Henry R. Myers and Peter D. Stockton, the chief investigators for the congressional subcommittees, have spent nearly fifteen years relaying the Duckett and Hadden suppositions to journalists as the views of knowledgeable intelligence sources; many reporters published the beliefs of Duckett and Hadden as "facts."

For example, Myers, a specialist on energy issues for the House Subcommittee on Energy, told the author at the beginning of his research into Zalman Shapiro that there "are reasons to believe that NVMEC had been set up solely for the diversion. The reason for this," Myers explained, "is that no one's ever seen clearly where the money came from." Myers referred to David Lowenthal's role in 1948 in Israel and added: "There were reports of a secure telephone or teletype between NUMEC and the Israeli embassy." Myers also told of sitting in on a meeting about NUMEC between Richard Helms and a group of legislators: "Helms said, in effect, that Shapiro was the head of a group of people collecting information, some classified and some not, for Israel." There was a further allegation that CIA operatives in Israel had found "traces of enriched uranium" near Dimona that was similar to the enriched products  hat had been delivered for processing to Shapiro's plant. There also was a highly suspicious meeting at the airport in Pittsburgh between Shapiro and Jeruham Kafkafi, an Israeli scientific attache, who flew, so the FBI reported, from Washington to Pittsburgh for the meeting and returned immediately to Washington. Myers described Kafkafi as "a possible Israeli intelligence officer."

Myers continued to believe well into the early 1990S that his statements were correct. But the fact is that David Lowenthal was one of a number of investors in NUMEC, some of whom were not Jewish. There was no special secure telephone or teletype at NUMEC, a fact acknowledged by Duckett and others who have investigated the alleged diversion. Richard Helms may indeed have been convinced that Shapiro was the head of an Israeli spy ring, but there is no known factual basis for that assertion. Duckett and other government investigators into NUMEC acknowledged that there was no meaningful correlation between the uranium processed in the NUMEC plant and the traces of enriched uranium picked up by American agents outside Dimona. And, finally, Shapiro told the congressional investigators-who obviously did not believe him-that his airport meeting with Kafkafi was arranged at his request because he had not been paid for the antiterrorist equipment his company had shipped to Israel; NUMEC was owed $32,000 -- a fact he found "embarrassing" -- but the company needed the money.

***

Duckett, in a 1991 interview, essentially recanted many of his previous assertions. "With all the grief I've caused," he said, referring to Shapiro's ruined career, "I know of nothing at all to indicate that Shapiro was guilty. There's circumstantial information, but I have never attempted to make a judgment on this. At no point did I have any vested interest in this whole process. It was a matter of trying to be sure when you had information that you passed it along. Ultimately," Duckett said, "you have no control over the information. I never met Shapiro and at no point was I interested in peddling the story."

Peter Stockton also acknowledged in a 1991 interview that he'd had continuing doubts about the credibility of Hadden. "I was never overwhelmed with him," Stockton said. He had been troubled, he said, when Hadden told one story to subcommittee investigators and legislators, and then told a different version of the same event to officials of the Government Accounting Office, which did a separate investigation of the alleged NUMEC diversion. "We were dependent on certain people," Stockton said, "who jerked us around." Yet Stockton continued to meet with reporters about NUMEC and continued to spread the same misinformation, and many journalists remain convinced that Shapiro diverted uranium for the Israeli bomb. In their book Dangerous Liaison, published in 1991, Andrew and Leslie Cockburn, who interviewed Stockton in 1989, depicted Shapiro's role in the Israeli acquisition of nuclear weapons as being so "delicate" that five American Presidents covered it up. "Stockton," they wrote, "found that at least one CIA official had a very clear idea of what the NUMEC affair was really all about. John Hadden...."

***

Babcock & Wilcox shut down Zalman Shapiro's Apollo plant in 1978, when the nuclear fuels business suffered a downturn, largely because of reduced business from the Navy. Shapiro's insistence that the missing uranium had seeped into the ground or been flung into the air eventually spawned a controversy over nuclear pollution; Babcock & Wilcox, under public pressure, agreed to keep the Apollo plant open in an attempt to determine how much contamination existed. In 1989 the firm began to decontaminate the plant, an expensive process that involved the virtual dismantling of some  areas. Babcock & Wilcox told the community that it would explore ways to return the site to productive use -- and promised that future operations would involve no radioactive materials.

Late in 1990, Congress approved a Defense Department appropriations bill that included $30 million to be spent in an attempt to clean up the plant, with matching funds from Babcock & Wilcox. Company officials acknowledged that many sections of the plant, including its concrete floor, were so contaminated that they had to be dismantled, piece by piece, and buried at appropriate sites-after the valuable uranium was removed. Nuclear Regulatory Commission officials subsequently admitted that more than one hundred kilograms of enriched uranium-the amount allegedly diverted to Israel by Zalman Shapiro-was recovered from the decommissioned plant by 1982, with still more being recovered each year. (Such recoveries are called "inventory gains" by the NRC.) It wasn't clear how much uranium would finally be found. It also wasn't clear whether the $60 million allotted for the cleanup by the government and Babcock & Wilcox would be enough to do the job. And it wasn't clear that the site would ever be safe for occupancy.

_______________

1.  An Apollo housewife, Cynthia A. Virostek, eventually began a campaign to increase public awareness of the potential pollution risk from the plant. In 1990, largely on the strength of her protests, she was elected local councilwoman. Mrs. Virostek, then thirty-five years old, lives with her husband and two sons five hundred feet from the Babcock & Wilcox plant. She became involved after company officials announced in the early 1980s that they were beginning decontamination operations. "That kind of opened my eyes," she said. "I began asking questions about the plant and nobody gave me answers." She then began a relentless campaign, through Freedom of Information inquiries, to force information out into the open. A Pennsylvania health department study eventually noted, Mrs. Virostek said, that her community was the only one in the immediate area to have a statistically significant excess in the number of cancer deaths.

http://www.american-buddha.com/lit.sams ... rsh.18.htm

5. Internal Wars

See Jabber for the generally held and mistaken view of the early resignations of the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission, as well as Every Spy a Prince, by Dan Raviv and Yossi Melman (Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1990), page 69. Raviv and Melman, however, mention Binyamin Blumberg's important and early role in the Israeli bomb on the same page. Black and Morris also deal with Blumberg's little-known history. Ian Smart was interviewed in New York on July 23, 1989. He was then living in London. Thomas Graham was interviewed in Washington on May IS, 1989; his cited article is "The Economics of Producing Nuclear Weapons in Nth Countries," by Thomas W. Graham, in Strategies for Managing Nuclear Proliferation, edited by D. L. Brito, M. D. Intriligator, and A. E. Wick (Lexington Books, Lexington, Mass., 1983). Peres's boast about raising money can be found in the previously cited weekend magazine of Yediot Abronot.

6. Going Public

John Finney was interviewed in Washington on April 18, 1989. The cited article was "U.S. Hears Israel Moves Toward A-Bomb Potential," New York Times, December 19. 1960, page I. McCone's resignation and TV appearance were also on page I that day: "McCone to Resign as AEC Member." The cited Buchwald column (reprinted in part, with his permission) was published January 10, 1961, in the New York Herald-Tribune, "The Smashing Tailors of Beersheba." Walter Elder was interviewed in his suburban Virginia home on August 28, 1989, and many times by telephone thereafter. Armand Meyer was interviewed in Rosslyn, Virginia, on June 15. 1990. The cited Herter statement can be found in The Alliance, by Richard J. Barnet (Simon & Schuster, New York, 1983), page 179. Philip Farley was interviewed in Palo Alto, California, on October 30, 1989. Chapman Pincher was interviewed by telephone on March 28, 1991; the cited article is "Israel May Be Making an A-Bomb," London Daily Express, December 16, 1960, page 2. Myron Kratzer was interviewed in Washington in June 1989, and by telephone thereafter. The cited Freedom of Information documents are in the author's possession. Christian Herter's testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee can be found in Vol. XIII, Part I, of the published Executive Sessions of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (Historical Series), made public April 1984.

7. Dual Loyalty

The Strauss biography is No Sacrifice Too Great, by Richard Pfau (University Press of Virginia, Charlottesville, 19B+) There are many accounts of Oppenheimer's travails before the AEC; see The Oppenheimer Hearing, by John Major (Batsford, London, 1971). Strauss's test ban testimony was cited in The Glory and the Dream, by William Manchester (Little, Brown, Boston, 1973), page 985. Carl Kaysen was interviewed in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on November 11, 1989, and thereafter by telephone. William L. Strauss was interviewed by telephone on April 3, 1991; Alice Strauss was interviewed by telephone on May 6, 1991. Algie Wells was interviewed by telephone on March 29, 1991.

8. A Presidential Struggle

Abe Feinberg's role in presidential politics and fund-raising was initially reported in an unpublished dissertation, "Ethnic Linkage and Foreign Policy," by Etta Zablocki, Columbia University, 1983 (available through UMI dissertation information service, Ann Arbor, Mich.). Similar material was published in The Lobby, by Edward Tivnan (Simon & Schuster, New York, 1987), and Truman and Israel, by Michael J. Cohen (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1990). None of the accounts discusses Feinberg's relationship with the Israeli nuclear program. Clark Clifford was interviewed about Feinberg on April 8, 1991. Abraham Ribicoff was interviewed by telephone on November 5, 1990. Ben Bradlee and Arthur Schlesinger discussed President Kennedy on April 9, 1991. Kennedy's comments about campaign financing were made on October 4, 1961, according to Facts on File. A good account of Kennedy's efforts on campaign financing can be found in Congressional Quarterly's "Congress and the Nation 1965-1968," Vol. II, "Political Finances," p. 444. Myer Feldman was interviewed in Washington on June 13, 1989, and many times thereafter. Jerome Weisner was interviewed by telephone on June 17, 1991. Robert Komer was interviewed in Washington on April 3. 1989, and two times thereafter. William Crawford was interviewed in suburban Maryland on May 3, 1990. Israel's diversion of the Norwegian heavy water has been thoroughly researched and reported by Gary Milhollin, director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control in Washington. Milhollin was the first to expose the issue, and has been more than generous in sharing his files and research. The explanation for the lack of a Shavit I can he found in "Publicity on Rocket Explained in Israel," New York Times, June 10, 1961. Paul Nitze was interviewed on October 9.199°. Robert McNamara's cryptic conversation with the author took place on January II, 1991. The more logical account of why the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission fell apart in the late 1950s was supplied by Yuval Neeman, minister of energy, in a conversation in Washington on April 15, 1991. Neeman would not discuss any current issues relating to Israel's nuclear capabilities. Floyd Culler was interviewed on November 30, 1989, in Palo Alto, California, and later by telephone. Phillips Talbot was interviewed briefly by telephone on April 8, 1991.

http://www.american-buddha.com/lit.sams ... sh.not.htm

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Good coverage lifted from Michael Collins Piper's book "Final Judgement" with other parts thrown in:

--------------

Kennedy, Dimona, and Israel's Deadly Secrets

May 5, 2010 by Ironlight

Photobucket
Mossad And The JFK Assassination
Source: www.john-f-kennedy.net

"Israel need not apologize for the assassination or destruction of those who seek to destroy it. The first order of business for any country is the protection of its people."
Washington Jewish Week, October 9, 1997

In March, 1992, Illinois Representative Paul Findley said in The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, "It is interesting – but not surprising – to note that in all the words written and uttered about the Kennedy assassination, Israel's intelligence agency, the Mossad, has never been mentioned."

Considering that the Mossad is quite possibly the most ruthless and efficient intelligence agency in the world, it is peculiar that they have never been scrutinized in relation to the Kennedy assassination, especially when practically every other entity in the world has been implicated. But that all changed in January, 1994 with the release of Michael Collins Piper's Final Judgment. In this book, Piper says, "Israel's Mossad was a primary (and critical) behind the scenes player in the conspiracy that ended the life of JFK. Through its own vast resources and through its international contacts in the intelligence community and in organized crime, Israel had the means, it had the opportunity, and it had the motive to play a major frontline role in the crime of the century – and it did."

Their motive? Israel's much touted Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, who ruled that country from its inception in 1948 until he resigned on June 16, 1963, was so enraged at John F. Kennedy for not allowing Israel to become a nuclear power that, Collins asserts, in his final days in office he commanded the Mossad to become involved in a plot to kill America's president.

Ben-Gurion was so convinced that Israel's very survival was in dire jeopardy that in one of his final letters to JFK he said, "Mr. President, my people have the right to exist, and this existence is in danger."

In the days leading up to Ben-Gurion's resignation from office, he and JFK had been involved in an unpublicized, contentious debate over the possibility of Israel getting nuclear capabilities. Their disagreement eventually escalated into a full-fledged war of words that was virtually ignored in the press. Ethan Bronner wrote about this secret battle between JFK and Ben-Gurion years later in a New York Times article on October 31, 1998, calling it a "fiercely hidden subject." In fact, the Kennedy/Ben-Gurion conversations are still classified by the United States Government. Maybe this is the case because Ben-Gurion's rage and frustration became so intense – and his power so great within Israel – that Piper contends it was at the center of the conspiracy to kill John Kennedy. This stance is supported by New York banker Abe Feinberg, who describes the situation as such: "Ben-Gurion could be vicious, and he had such a hatred of the old man [Joe Kennedy, Sr., JFK's father]." Ben-Gurion despised Joe Kennedy because he felt that not only was he an anti-Semite, but that he had also sided with Hitler during the 1930′s and 40′s.

Ben-Gurion was convinced that Israel needed nuclear weapons to insure its survival, while Kennedy was dead-set against it. This inability to reach an agreement caused obvious problems. One of them revolved around Kennedy's decision that he would make America his top priority in regard to foreign policy, and not Israel! Kennedy planned to honor the 1950 Tripartite Declaration which said that the United States would retaliate against any nation in the Middle East that attacked any other country. Ben-Gurion, on the other hand, wanted the Kennedy Administration to sell them offensive weapons, particularly Hawk missiles.

The two leaders thus engaged in a brutal letter exchange, but Kennedy wouldn't budge. Ben-Gurion, obsessed by this issue, slipped into total paranoia, feeling that Kennedy's obstinacy was a blatant threat to the very existence of Israel as a nation. Piper writes, "Ben-Gurion had devoted a lifetime creating a Jewish State and guiding it into the world arena. And, in Ben-Gurion's eyes, John F. Kennedy was an enemy of the Jewish people and his beloved state of Israel." He continues, "The 'nuclear option' was not only at the very core of Ben-Gurion's personal world view, but the very foundation of Israel's national security policy."

Ben-Gurion was so preoccupied with obtaining nuclear weapons that on June 27, 1963, eleven days after resigning from office, he announced, "I do not know of any other nation whose neighbors declare that they wish to terminate it, and not only declare, but prepare for it by all means available to them. We must have no illusions that what is declared every day in Cairo, Damascus, and Iraq are just words. This is the thought that guides the Arab leaders ... I am confident ... that science is able to provide us with the weapons that will serve the peace and deter our enemies."

Avner Cohen, in Israel and the Bomb, published by Columbia University Press, reinforces this sense of urgency by writing, "Imbued with lessons of the Holocaust, Ben-Gurion was consumed by fears of security ... Anxiety about the Holocaust reached beyond Ben-Gurion to infuse Israel's military thinking." He further adds fuel to this point by pointing out, "Ben-Gurion had no qualms about Israel's need for weapons of mass destruction," and "Ben-Gurion's world view and his decisive governing style shaped his critical role in instigating Israel's nuclear progress."

Kennedy, on the other hand, was adamant in his refusal to promote Israel's ascension to the nuclear stage. Avner Cohen, in Israel and the Bomb, stresses, "No American president was more concerned with the danger of nuclear proliferation than John Fitzgerald Kennedy. He was convinced that the spread of nuclear weapons would make the world more dangerous and undermine U.S. interests." Cohen continues at the end of this passage, "The only example Kennedy used to make this point was Israel."

Realizing that Kennedy would not change his mind, Ben-Gurion decided to join forces with Communist China. Both countries were greatly interested in creating nuclear programs, and so began their secret joint dealings. Working in unison through intermediary Shaul Eisenberg, who was a partner of Mossad gun-runner and accountant Tibor Rosenbaum, Israel and China proceeded to develop their own nuclear capabilities without the knowledge of the United States.

If you find this scenario improbable, I strongly urge you to read Gordon Thomas' excellent book, Seeds of Fire, where he exposes how the Mossad and CSIS (Chinese secret service) have conspired on many occasions to not only steal American military secrets, but to also doctor U.S. intelligence programs such as the Justice Department's PROMISE software. This instance, I am afraid to say, is but the first where echoes of the JFK assassination can still be felt today reverberating through our post 9-11 world. The danger of Israel developing the Bomb in unison with China became a highly volatile situation, and was closely monitored by the CIA.

Intent on pursuing this path, the Israelis constructed a nuclear facility at Dimona. When Kennedy demanded that the U.S. inspect this plant, Ben-Gurion was so incensed that he erected another PHONY facility that held no evidence of nuclear research and development. Fully aware of their shenanigans, though, JFK told Charles Bartlett, "The sons of bitches lie to me constantly about their nuclear capability."

Avner Cohen, in Israel and the Bomb, reiterates this claim by saying that Ben-Gurion had taken the nuclear issue so closely to heart that he, "concluded that he could not tell the truth about Dimona to American leaders, not even in private."

Dr. Gerald M. Steinberg, political science professor at Bar-Ilan University's BESA Center for Strategic Studies in Tel Aviv, weighs in by saying, "Between 1961 and 1963, the Kennedy administration placed a great deal of pressure on Ben-Gurion in the effort to pressure for acceptance of international inspection of Dimona and Israeli abdication of their nuclear weapons. This pressure apparently did not alter Israeli policy, but it was a contributing factor to Ben-Gurion's resignation in 1963."

To convey how serious this situation had become in modern terms, look at what is happening in Iraq with United Nations security teams inspecting the royal palaces and bunkers for nuclear weapons and materials. This matter is so urgent that our nation is on the verge of war. Forty years earlier, the heat that JFK was placing on Ben-Gurion was equal to what George Bush is laying on Saddam Hussein today. [The difference being, of course, that Iraq never actually possessed weapons of mass destruction, and the intelligence which said they did came from Israel.]

In Israel and the Bomb, Avner Cohen reinforces this point. "To force Ben-Gurion to accept the conditions, Kennedy exerted the most useful leverage available to an American president in dealing with Israel: a threat that an unsatisfactory solution would jeopardize the U.S. government's commitment to, and support of, Israel."

The pressure on Ben-Gurion was so immense that he ended up leaving office. But Kennedy, in true pitbull style, didn't let up on Ben-Gurion's successor, Levi Eshkol, either, as Avner Cohen reports. "Kennedy told Eshkol that the U.S. commitment and support of Israel 'could be seriously jeopardized' if Israel did not let the U.S. obtain 'reliable information' about its efforts in the nuclear field. Kennedy's demands were unprecedented. They amounted, in effect, to an ultimatum." Cohen concludes this thought by asserting, "Kennedy's letter precipitated a near-crisis situation in Eshkol's office."

In the end, as we're all aware, Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963; but less known is that China conducted its first nuclear test in October, 1964. What makes this event more profound is Piper's claim that even though Israel said its first nuclear tests took place in 1979, they actually occurred in October, 1964 along with the Chinese! If this is true, other than August, 1945 when the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, October 1964 may possibly be the most dangerous month in 20th century history.

Let's return, though, to JFK's assassination and the direct results of it in regard to the Jewish lobby, American foreign policy, and the militarization of Israel. To understand how powerful the Israeli lobby is in this country, venerable Senator J. William Fulbright told CBS Face the Nation on April 15, 1973, "Israel controls the U.S. Senate. The Senate is subservient, much too much; we should be more concerned about U.S. interests rather than doing the bidding of Israel. The great majority of the Senate of the U.S. – somewhere around 80% – is completely in support of Israel; anything Israel wants, Israel gets. This has been demonstrated time and again, and this has made [foreign policy] difficult for our government."

This isn't the quote of some crazy conspiracy theorist or a KKK anti-Semite. It's a much-respected U.S. Senator saying that about 80% of the Senate is in Israel's hip pocket [and this was 1973]. Adding clout to this argument is Rep. Paul Findley, who was quoted in The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs in March, 1992, "During John Kennedy's campaign for the presidency, a group of New York Jews had privately offered to meet his campaign expenses if he would let them set his Middle East policy. He did not agree ... As the president, he provided only limited support of Israel."

To understand how important Kennedy's decisions were during his short-lived presidency, we need to look at the issue of campaign finance. Considering how influential the Israeli lobby is in the U.S. Senate (hearkening back to the words of Senator Fulbright), they had to have been enraged when President Kennedy genuinely wanted to cut the knees out from under the current campaign finance methods because it made politicians so reliant upon the huge cash inlays of special-interest groups. Regrettably, Kennedy did not have the time to implement this program, and to this day our political system is still monopolized by lobbyists from the very same special-interest groups. One can only imagine what changes would have occurred in regard to our foreign policy had Kennedy eradicated these vipers and blood-suckers from the halls of Congress.

Tragically, Kennedy's ideas never came to fruition, and his heated battle with Prime Minister Ben-Gurion over whether Israel should be allowed to develop a nuclear program was ultimately lost. The reason why is that Lyndon Baines Johnson, who Kennedy intended to drop from his ticket in 1964 due to his extreme dislike for, had a complete reversal in foreign policy. As you will see, not only did Israel's nuclear program move ahead unchecked; they also became the primary beneficiary of our foreign aid.

But this absolute turnaround would not have occurred if Kennedy would not have been assassinated. Up until LBJ became president, Kennedy dealt with the Middle East in a way that most benefited the U.S. His primary goal – and one which would most keep the peace – was a balance of power in the Middle East so that each and every nation would be secure. This decision adhered to the Tripartite Declaration which the U.S. signed in 1950. But under the Johnson administration, this fragile balance was overturned, and by 1967 – only four years after Kennedy's assassination – the U.S. was Israel's main weapons supplier, and OUR best interests were put well behind those of Israel!

As Michael Collins Piper writes: "The bottom line is this: JFK was adamantly determined to stop Israel from building the nuclear bomb. LBJ simply looked the other way. JFK's death did indeed prove beneficial to Israel's nuclear ambitions and the evidence proves it."

Reuven Pedatzer, in a review of Avner Cohen's Israel and the Bomb, in the Israeli Newspaper Ha'aretz on February 5, 1999 wrote, "The murder of American president John F. Kennedy brought to an abrupt end the massive pressure being applied by the U.S. administration on the government of Israel to discontinue their nuclear program." He continues, "Kennedy made it quite clear to the Israeli Prime Minister that he would not under any circumstances agree to Israel becoming a nuclear state." Pedatzer concludes, "Had Kennedy remained alive, it is doubtful whether Israel would today have a nuclear option," and that, "Ben-Gurion's decision to resign in 1963 was taken to a large extent against the background of the tremendous pressure that Kennedy was applying on him concerning the nuclear issue."

If you're still not convinced; how about some numbers? In Kennedy's last fiscal budget year of 1964, Israeli aid was $40 million. In LBJ's first budget of 1965, it soared to $71 million, and in 1966 more than tripled from two years earlier to $130 million! Plus, during Kennedy's administration, almost none of our aid to Israel was military in nature. Instead, it was split equally between development loans and food assistance under the PL480 Program. Yet in 1965 under the Johnson administration, 20% of our aid to Israel was for the military, while in 1966, 71% was used for war-related materials. [And contrast this, further, with the billions in annual aid which they receive today...]

Continuing in this same vein, in 1963 the Kennedy administration sold 5 Hawk missiles to Israel as part of an air-defense system. In 1965-66, though, LBJ laid 250 tanks on Israel, 48 Skyhawk attack aircrafts, plus guns and artillery which were all offensive in nature. If you ever wondered when the Israeli War Machine was created, this is it! LBJ was its father.

According to Stephen Green in Taking Sides: America's Secret Relations with a Militant Israel, "The $92 million in military assistance provided in fiscal year 1966 was greater than the total of all official military aid provided to Israel cumulatively in all the years going back to the foundation of that nation in 1948."

Green continues, "70% of all U.S. official assistance to Israel has been military. America has given Israel over $17 billion in military aid since 1946, virtually all of which – over 99% – has been provided since 1965."

Can you see what's happening here? Within two years of JFK's assassination, Israel went from being a comparatively weak, outmatched member of the volatile Middle Eastern community that was not allowed to develop nuclear weapons to one that was well on its way to becoming a undeniable military force on the world stage. John Kennedy adamantly put his foot down and refused to allow Israel to develop a nuclear program, while LBJ bent over backward to facilitate and bolster them. Or, as Seymour Hersh wrote in The Samson Option, "By 1968, the president had no intention of doing anything to stop the Israeli bomb."

The result of this shift in focus from the Kennedy to Johnson administration is, in my opinion, the PRIMARY reason behind our current troubles in the Middle East which culminated in the 9-11 attacks and our upcoming war with Iraq (and beyond). I have a great deal of confidence in this statement, for as Michael Collins Piper points out, here are the results of John F. Kennedy's assassination:

1) Our foreign and military aid to Israel increased dramatically once LBJ became president.

2) Rather than trying to maintain a BALANCE in the Middle East, Israel suddenly emerged as the dominant force.

3) Since the LBJ administration, Israel has always had weaponry that was superior to any of its direct neighbors.

4) Due to this undeniable and obvious increase in Israel's War Machine, a constant struggle has been perpetuated in the Middle East.

5) LBJ also allowed Israel to proceed with its nuclear development, resulting in them becoming the 6th largest nuclear force in the world.

6) Finally, our huge outlays of foreign aid to Israel (approximately $10 billion/year when all is said and done) has created a situation of never-ending attacks and retaliation in the Middle East, plus outright scorn and enmity against the U.S. for playing the role of Israel's military enabler.

In Israel's, and especially David Ben-Gurion's eyes then, what were their alternatives – to remain weakened (or at least balanced) in relation to their neighbors and handcuffed by JFK's refusal to bow to their will, or KILL the one man standing in their way to becoming dominant in the Middle East, the recipient of huge amounts of military aid, and one of the premier nuclear forces in the world? It's something to think about. Also, while these thoughts are running through your head, ask yourself this question. If Kennedy, LBJ, and all subsequent administrations would have adhered to the 1950 Tripartite Declaration and did everything in their power to maintain balance in the Middle East instead of pushing Israel to the forefront, would our Towers have been attacked on 9-11, 2001, and would we be on the verge of a possibly catastrophic war today? It's certainly something to ponder.
——————————————————
More Evidence Mossad Killed JFK Over Israeli Nukes: The Missing Link In The JFK Assassination Conspiracy
From John
9-28-3
Rense.com

(Note – The second item further below is a letter from JFK to Israeli Prime Minister Eshkol which makes it crystal clear JFK did NOT want the Jewish state to develop nuclear weapons and that he was demanding regular US inspections of the Dimona Nuclear facility... which, as we now know, was/is used to develop Israel's enormous inventory of atomic and thermonuclear weapons. The US Air Force white paper regarding past and ongoing Israeli thermonuclear blackmail of the US is a stunning look at how Zionism has exerted such staggering domination over the US for decades. -ed)

After reading: "New JFK Assassination Theory" from WND, it is obvious that it is just more dis-information diverting attention away from the more than likely perpetrators, the Mossad. It's only fair to remind or inform your readers of the theory posed by Michael Collins Piper in 'Final Judgment'. His theory makes more sense than anything.

Photobucket
Final Judgement Reviewed by Mark Braver

There seems to be a lot of misunderstanding concerning what Final Judgment does and does not say about the JFK assassination. The book does not say that "the Jews killed JFK." That's horse manure.

What the book does say is that: When New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison charged businessman Clay Shaw with participation in the JFK assassination conspiracy Garrison stumbled upon the Israeli Mossad connection to the murder of President Kennedy. Shaw served on the board of a shadowy corporation known as Permindex. A primary shareholder in Permindex was the Banque De Credit International of Geneva, founded by Tibor Rosenbaum, an arms procurer and financier for the Mossad.

What's more, the Mossad-sponsored Swiss bank was the chief "money launderer" for Meyer Lansky, the head of the international crime syndicate and an Israeli loyalist whose operations meshed closely on many fronts with the American CIA.

The chairman of Permindex was Louis M. Bloomfield of Montreal, a key figure in the Israeli lobby and an operative of the Bronfman family of Canada, long-time Lansky associates and among Israel's primary international patrons.

In the pages of "Final Judgment" the Israeli connection to the JFK assassination is explored in frightening–and fully documented–detail. For example, did you know:

* That JFK was engaged in a bitter secret conflict with Israel over U.S. East policy and that Israel's prime minister resigned in disgust, saying JFK's stance threatened Israel's very survival?

* That JFK's successor, Lyndon Johnson, immediately reversed America's policy toward Israel?

* That the top Mafia figures often alleged to be behind the JFK assassination were only front men for Meyer Lansky?

* That the CIA's liaison to the Mossad, James Angleton, was a prime mover behind the cover-up of the JFK assassination?

Why didn't Oliver Stone, in his famous movie "JFK" not mention any of this [silly question]? It turns out the chief financial backer of Stone's film was longtime Mossad figure, Arnon Milchan, Israel's biggest arms dealer.

The very fact that the Israeli lobby has gone to such great lengths to try to smear Michael Collins Piper and to try to discredit Final Judgment only boosts the book's credibility. If the book was really so silly or so unconvincing, it doesn't seem likely that groups such as the Anti-Defamation League would go out of their way to try to suppress the book as they have.

The fact is that Piper demonstrates that Israel did indeed have a very strong motive to want to get JFK out of the way and that numerous people who have been linked in other writings to the JFK conspiracy were (as Piper documents) also in the sphere of influence of Israel's Mossad. Not only Clay Shaw in New Orleans, but also James Angleton at the CIA, who was Israel's strongest advocate at the CIA and also the CIA's liaison to the Mossad. The Israeli connection is indeed "the missing link in the JFK assassination conspiracy."

The "Reader from Chicago" who wrote the review of Final Judgment posted here is really off the beam and I suspect he (or she) is deliberately distorting what Piper's book does say in order to try to discourage people from reading it.

The fact is that Piper's book documents (quite clearly, in my estimation) not only the means, opportunity and the motive for Israeli Mossad involvement in the assassination (working in conjunction with the CIA), but it is also quite fascinating and very interesting read. "Boring" is the last word I'd use to describe the book, and it is certainly not "poorly written."

What's more, the book is not–I repeat–not "anti-Semitic" [this word loses meaning with every passing day] and the book has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the subject of the Holocaust. In fact, anybody familiar with any of the standard writings on the JFK assassination will recognize the names of some of the key players in the scenario Piper documents: Clay Shaw, David Ferrie, Guy Banister and James J. Angleton of the CIA–and none of them were Jewish. So where this reviewer gets off saying that Piper finds "a Jew under every rock" is beyond me. I have read literally hundreds of books and magazine articles and other material on the JFK assassination and not in a single one of them–with the exception of Final Judgment–did I ever learn that President John F. Kennedy was trying to stop Israel from building the nuclear bomb and that this literally touched off a "secret war" behind the scenes between JFK and Israel's prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, who resigned (among other reasons) in disgust over JFK's policies with Israel. In fact, Israeli historian Avner Cohen in his book, Israel and the Bomb, documents this quite thoroughly.

And in Final Judgment Piper also outlines some interesting Israeli connections by people who have been linked to the JFK assassination and cover-up, including Clay Shaw of New Orleans. Even Israeli journalist Barry Chamish has written in an Internet review of Final Judgment that he finds Piper's Israeli connection (via Shaw and Permindex) quite convincing.

There was a controversy in the Chicago area following an attempt by the Anti-Defamation League (an Israeli lobby organization) and people associated with the ADL to prevent Final Judgment from being placed in the Schaumburg Township District Library. Chances are the Reader from Chicago is probably an ADL representative! –This text refers to the Unknown Binding edition.

JFK's Concern Over Israel's Nuclear Bomb Program: JFK's Letter To Israeli PM Eshkol July 5, 1963

Dear Mr. Prime Minister (Eshkol),

It gives me great personal pleasure to extend congratulations as you assume your responsibilities as Prime Minister of Israel. You have our friendship and best wishes in your new tasks. It is on one of these that I am writing you at this time.

You are aware, I am sure, of the exchange which I had with Prime Minister Ben-Gurion concerning American visits (ie: inspections -ed) to Israel's nuclear facility at Dimona. Most recently, the Prime Minister wrote to me on May 27. His words reflected a most intense personal consideration of a problem that I know is not easy for your Government, as it is not for mine. We welcomed the former Prime Minister's strong reaffirmation that Dimona will be devoted exclusively to peaceful purposes and the reaffirmation also of Israel's willingness to permit periodic visits (ie: inspections -ed) to Dimona.

I regret having to add to your burdens so soon after your assumption of office, but I feel the crucial importance of this problem necessitates my taking up with you at this early date certain further considerations, arising out of Mr. Ben-Gurion's May 27 letter, as to the nature and scheduling of such visits.

I am sure you will agree that these visits should be as nearly as possible in accord with international standards, thereby resolving all doubts as to the peaceful intent of the Dimona project. As I wrote Mr. Ben-Gurion, this Government's commitment to and support of Israel could be seriously jeopardized if it should be thought that we were unable to obtain reliable information on a subject as vital to the peace as the question of Israel's effort in the nuclear field.

Therefore, I asked our scientists to review the alternative schedules of visits we and you had proposed. If Israel's purposes are to be clear beyond reasonable doubt, I believe that the schedule which would best serve our common purposes would be a visit early this summer, another visit in June 1964, and thereafter at intervals of six months. I am sure that such a schedule should not cause you any more difficulty than that which Mr. Ben-Gurion proposed in his May 27 letter. It would be essential, and I understand that Mr. Ben-Gurion's letter was in accord with this, that our scientist have access to all areas of the Dimona site and to any related part of the complex, such as fuel fabrication facilities or plutonium separation plant, and that sufficient time to be allotted for a thorough examination.

Knowing that you fully appreciate the truly vital significance of this matter to the future well-being of Israel, to the United States, and internationally, I am sure our carefully considered request will have your most sympathetic attention.

Sincerely,
John F. Kennedy

http://www.jfkmontreal.com/toc.htm

Here (below) are excerpts from the US Air Force paper on Israel's nuclear blackmail of the United States and its influence on US foreign policy. One can draw additional conclusions about how such blackmail might have factored into the trillion plus US dollars that have benefited Israel since JFK's murder.
——————————————————
Zionist Israel's Thermonuclear Blackmail Of America
From Lili
2-26-3
Rense.com

Jeff – These are paragraphs of 'special interest' I wish to highlight from the long and detailed USAF report that follows...my comments are in all caps:

ISRAELI BLACKMAIL
One other purpose of Israeli nuclear weapons, not often stated, but obvious, is their "use" on the United States. America does not want Israel's nuclear profile raised.[144] They have been used in the past to ensure America does not desert Israel under increased Arab (or oil embargo) pressure and have forced the United States to support Israel diplomatically against the Soviet Union. Israel used their existence to guarantee a continuing supply of American conventional weapons, a policy likely to continue.[145]

ISRAEL DICTATES TO US AND WE CONCEDE TO ISRAEL
Israel went on full-scale nuclear alert again on the first day of Desert Storm, 18 January 1991. Seven SCUD missiles were fired against the cities of Tel Aviv and Haifa by Iraq (only two actually hit Tel Aviv and one hit Haifa). This alert lasted for the duration of the war, 43 days. Over the course of the war, Iraq launched around 40 missiles in 17 separate attacks at Israel. There was little loss of life: two killed directly, 11 indirectly, with many structures damaged and life disrupted.[98] Several supposedly landed near Dimona, one of them a close miss.[99] Threats of retaliation by the Shamir government if the Iraqis used chemical warheads were interpreted to mean that Israel intended to launch a nuclear strike if gas attacks occurred.

One Israeli commentator recommended that Israel should signal Iraq that "any Iraqi action against Israeli civilian populations, with or without gas, may leave Iraq without Baghdad."[100] Shortly before the end of the war the Israelis tested a "nuclear capable" missile which prompted the United States into intensifying its SCUD hunting in western Iraq to prevent any Israeli response.[101] The Israeli Air Force set up dummy SCUD sites in the Negev for pilots to practice on. "They found it no easy task.[102] American government concessions to Israel for not attacking (in addition to Israeli Patriot missile batteries) were:

* Allowing Israel to designate 100 targets inside Iraq for the coalition to destroy,

* Satellite downlink to increase warning time on the SCUD attacks (present and future),

* Technical parity with Saudi jet fighters in perpetuity.[103]

JFK demanded Israel allow inspectors to see Dimona. Three months later he was assassinated and pro-Israel Johnson is President:

The Israelis aggressively pursued an aircraft delivery system from the United States. President Johnson was less emphatic about nonproliferation than President Kennedy-or perhaps had more pressing concerns, such as Vietnam. He had a long history of both Jewish friends and pressing political contributors coupled with some firsthand experience of ["]the Holocaust["], having toured concentration camps at the end of World War II.[51]

Israel pressed LBJ hard for aircraft (A-4E Skyhawks initially and F-4E Phantoms later) and obtained agreement in 1966 under the condition that the aircraft would not be used to deliver nuclear weapons. The State Department attempted to link the aircraft purchases to continued inspection visits. President Johnson overruled the State Department concerning Dimona inspections.[52] Although denied at the time, America delivered the F-4Es, on September 5, 1969, with nuclear capable hardware intact.[53]

JONATHAN POLLARD
Not only were the Israelis interested in American nuclear weapons development data, they were interested in targeting data from U.S. intelligence. Israel discovered that they were on the Soviet target list. American-born Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard obtained satellite-imaging data of the Soviet Union, allowing Israel to acurately target Soviet cities. This showed Israel's intention to use its nuclear arsenal as a deterrent political lever, or retaliatory capability against the Soviet Union itself. Israel also used American satellite imagery to plan the 7 June 1981 attack on the Tammuz-1 reactor at Osiraq, Iraq. This daring attack, carried out by eight F-16s accompanied by six F-15s punched a hole in the concrete reactor dome before the reactor began operation (and just days before an Israeli election). It delivered 15 delay-fused 2000 pound bombs deep into the reactor structure (the 16th bomb hit a nearby hall). The blasts shredded the reactor and blew out the dome foundations, causing it to collapse on the rubble. This was the world's first attack on a nuclear reactor.[91]

(PLEASE KEEP IN MIND THAT RUSSIA WAS ABLE TO PURGE THE JEWISH BOLSHEVIK COMMUNISTS FROM THE KREMLIN STARTING IN THE LATE '30′s UNDER STALIN. SUBSEQUENTLY, THE JEWISH POWER STRUCTURE WAS GIVEN TOP POSITIONS IN THE U.S.)

FRIGHTENING
Another speculative area concerns Israeli nuclear security and possible misuse. What is the chain of decision and control of Israel's weapons? How susceptible are they to misuse or theft? With no open, frank, public debate on nuclear issues, there has accordingly been no debate or information concerning existing safeguards. This has led to accusations of "monolithic views and sinister intentions."[1360] Would a right wing military government decide to employ nuclear weapons recklessly? Ariel Sharon, an outspoken proponent of "Greater Israel" was quoted as saying, "Arabs may have the oil, but we have the matches."[137] Could the Gush Emunim, a right wing religious organization, or others, hijack a nuclear device to "liberate" the Temple Mount for the building of the third temple? Chances are small but could increase as radicals decry the peace process.[138] A 1997 article reviewing the Israeli Defense Force repeatedly stressed the possibilities of, and the need to guard against, a religious, right wing military coup, especially as the proportion of religious persons in the military increases.[139 ]

THE THIRD TEMPLE'S HOLY OF HOLIES – ISRAEL'S NUCLEAR WEAPONS
By Warner D. Farr, LTC, U.S. Army
The Counterproliferation Papers
Future Warfare Series No. 2

USAF Counterproliferation Center
Air War College – Air University
Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama
September 1999

The Counterproliferation Papers Series was established by the USAF Counterproliferation Center to provide information and analysis to U.S. national security policy-makers and USAF officers to assist them in countering the threat posed by adversaries equipped with weapons of mass destruction. Copies of papers in this series are available from the USAF Counterproliferation Center, 325 Chennault Circle, Maxwell AFB AL 36112-6427. The fax number is (334) 953-7538; phone (334) 953-7538.

The internet address for the USAF Counterproliferation Center is:

http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/awc-cps.htm

Contents:

Page
Disclaimer i
The Author ii
Acknowledgments iii
Abstract iv

I. Introduction 1
II. 1948-1962: With French Cooperation 3
III. 1963-1973: Seeing the Project Through to Completion 9
IV. 1974-1999: Bringing the Bomb Up the Basement Stairs 15

Appendix: Estimates of the Israeli Nuclear Arsenal 23
Notes 25

Disclaimer
The views expressed in this publication are those solely of the author and are not a statement of official policy or position of the U.S Government, the Department of Defense, the U.S. Army, or the USAF Counterproliferation Center.

The Author
Colonel Warner D. "Rocky" Farr, Medical Corps, Master Flight Surgeon, U.S. Army, graduated from the Air War College at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama before becoming the Command Surgeon, U.S. Army Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. He also serves as the Surgeon for the U.S. Army Special Forces Command, U.S. Army Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations Command, and the U.S. Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School. With thirty-three years of military service, he holds an Associate of Arts from the State University of New York, Bachelor of Science from Northeast Louisiana University, Doctor of Medicine from the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, Masters of Public Health from the University of Texas, and has completed medical residencies in aerospace medicine, and anatomic and clinical pathology. He is the only army officer to be board certified in these three specialties. Solo qualified in the TH-55A Army helicopter, he received flight training in the T-37 and T-38 aircraft as part of his USAF School of Aerospace Medicine residency.

Colonel Farr was a Master Sergeant Special Forces medic prior to receiving a direct commission to second lieutenant. He is now the senior Special Forces medical officer in the U.S. Army with prior assignments in the 5th, 7th, and 10th Special Forces Groups (Airborne), 1st Special Forces, in Vietnam, the United States, and Germany. He has advised the 12th and 20th Special Forces Groups (Airborne) in the reserves and national guard, served as Division Surgeon, 10th Mountain Division (Light Infantry), and as the Deputy Commander of the U.S. Army Aeromedical Center, Fort Rucker, Alabama.

Acknowledgments
I would like to acknowledge the assistance, guidance and encouragement from my Air War College (AWC) faculty research advisor, Dr. Andrew Terrill, instructor of the Air War College Arab-Israeli Wars course. Thanks are also due to the great aid of the Air University librarians. The author is also indebted to Captain J. R. Saunders, USN and Colonel Robert Sutton, USAF. Who also offered helpful suggestions.

Abstract
This paper is a history of the Israeli nuclear weapons program drawn from a review of unclassified sources. Israel began its search for nuclear weapons at the inception of the state in 1948. As payment for Israeli participation in the Suez Crisis of 1956, France provided nuclear expertise and constructed a reactor complex for Israel at Dimona capable of large-scale plutonium production and reprocessing. The United States discovered the facility by 1958 and it was a subject of continual discussions between American presidents and Israeli prime ministers. Israel used delay and deception to at first keep the United States at bay, and later used the nuclear option as a bargaining chip for a consistent American conventional arms supply. After French disengagement in the early 1960s, Israel progressed on its own, including through several covert operations, to project completion. Before the 1967 Six-Day War, they felt their nuclear facility threatened and reportedly assembled several nuclear devices. By the 1973 Yom Kippur War Israel had a number of sophisticated nuclear bombs, deployed them, and considered using them. The Arabs may have limited their war aims because of their knowledge of the Israeli nuclear weapons. Israel has most probably conducted several nuclear bomb tests. They have continued to modernize and vertically proliferate and are now one of the world's larger nuclear powers. Using "bomb in the basement" nuclear opacity, Israel has been able to use its arsenal as a deterrent to the Arab world while not technically violating American nonproliferation requirements.

The Third Temple's Holy of Holies: Israel's Nuclear Weapons
Warner D. Farr
I. Introduction

This is the end of the Third Temple.
- Attributed to Moshe Dayan
during the Yom Kippur War1

As Zionists in Palestine watched World War II from their distant sideshow, what lessons were learned? The soldiers of the Empire of Japan vowed on their emperor's sacred throne to fight to the death and not face the inevitability of an American victory. Many Jews wondered if the Arabs would try to push them into the Mediterranean Sea. After the devastating American nuclear attack on Japan, the soldier leaders of the empire reevaluated their fight to the death position. Did the bomb give the Japanese permission to surrender and live? It obviously played a military role, a political role, and a [distorted as it may be] peacemaking role. How close was the mindset of the Samurai culture to the Islamic culture? Did David Ben-Gurion take note of the Allied strategy and wonder if the same would work for Israel?2 Could Israel find the ultimate deterrent that would convince her opponents that they could never, ever succeed? Was Israel's ability to cause a modern holocaust the best way to guarantee never having ["]another["] one?

The use of unconventional weapons in the Middle East is not new. The British had used chemical artillery shells against the Turks at the second battle of Gaza in 1917. They continued chemical shelling against the Shiites in Iraq in 1920 and used aerial chemicals in the 1920s and 1930s in Iraq.3 [Contrast the "good guy" approach with that of the "bad guys"...]

Israel's involvement with nuclear technology starts at the founding of the state in 1948. Many talented Jewish scientists immigrated to Palestine during the thirties and forties, in particular, Ernst David Bergmann. He would become the director of the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission and the founder of Israel's efforts to develop nuclear weapons. Bergmann, a close friend and advisor of Israel's first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, counseled that nuclear energy could compensate for Israel's poor natural resources and small pool of military manpower. He pointed out that there was just one nuclear energy, not two, suggesting nuclear weapons were part of the plan.4 As early as 1948, Israeli scientists actively explored the Negev Desert for uranium deposits on orders from the Israeli Ministry of Defense. By 1950, they found low-grade deposits near Beersheba and Sidon and worked on a low power method of heavy water production.5

The newly created Weizmann Institute of Science actively supported nuclear research by 1949, with Dr. Bergmann heading the chemistry division. Promising students went overseas to study nuclear engineering and physics at Israeli government expense. Israel secretly founded its own Atomic Energy Commission in 1952 and placed it under the control of the Defense Ministry.6 The foundations of a nuclear program were beginning to develop.

II. 1948-1962: With French Cooperation
It has always been our intention to develop a nuclear potential.
- Ephraim Katzir7

In 1949, Francis Perrin, a member of the French Atomic Energy Commission, nuclear physicist, and friend of Dr. Bergmann visited the Weizmann Institute. He invited Israeli scientists to the new French nuclear research facility at Saclay. A joint research effort was subsequently set up between the two nations. Perrin publicly stated in 1986 that French scientists working in America on the Manhattan Project and in Canada during World War II were told they could use their knowledge in France provided they kept it a secret.8 Perrin reportedly provided nuclear data to Israel on the same basis.9 One Israeli scientist worked at the U.S. Los Alamos National Laboratory and may have directly brought expertise home.10

After the Second World War, France's nuclear research capability was quite limited. France had been a leading research center in nuclear physics before World War II, but had fallen far behind the U.S., the U.S.S.R., the United Kingdom, and even Canada. Israel and France were at a similar level of expertise after the war, and Israeli scientists could make significant contributions to the French effort. Progress in nuclear science and technology in France and Israel remained closely linked throughout the early fifties. Israeli scientists probably helped construct the G-1 plutonium production reactor and UP-1 reprocessing plant at Marcoule.11 France profited from two Israeli patents on heavy water production and low-grade uranium enrichment.12 In the 1950s and into the early 1960s, France and Israel had close relations in many areas. France was Israel's principal arms supplier, and as instability spread through French colonies in North Africa, Israel provided valuable intelligence obtained from contacts with sephardic Jews in those countries.

The two nations collaborated, with the United Kingdom, in planning and staging the Suez Canal-Sinai operation against Egypt in October 1956. The Suez Crisis became the real genesis of Israel's nuclear weapons production program. With the Czech-Egyptian arms agreement in 1955, Israel became worried. When absorbed, the Soviet-bloc equipment would triple Egyptian military strength. After Egypt's President Nasser closed the Straits of Tiran in 1953, Israeli Prime Minister Ben-Gurion ordered the development of chemical munitions and other unconventional munitions, including nuclear.13 Six weeks before the Suez Canal operation, Israel felt the time was right to approach France for assistance in building a nuclear reactor. Canada had set a precedent a year earlier when it had agreed to build a 40-megawatt CIRUS reactor in India. Shimon Peres, the Director-General of the Defense Ministry and aide to Prime Minister (and Defense Minister) David Ben-Gurion, and Bergmann met with members of the CEA (France's Atomic Energy Commission). During September 1956, they reached an initial understanding to provide a research reactor. The two countries concluded final agreements at a secret meeting outside Paris where they also finalized details of the Suez Canal operation.14

For the United Kingdom and France, the Suez operation, launched on October 29, 1956, was a total disaster. Israel's part was a military success, allowing it to occupy the entire Sinai Peninsula by 4 November, but the French and British canal invasion on 6 November was a political failure. Their attempt to advance south along the Suez Canal stopped due to a cease-fire under fierce Soviet and U.S. pressure. Both nations pulled out, leaving Israel to face the pressure from the two superpowers alone. Soviet Premier Bulganin and President Khrushchev issued an implicit threat of nuclear attack if Israel did not withdraw from the Sinai.

On 7 November 1956, a secret meeting was held between Israeli foreign minister Golda Meir, Shimon Peres, and French foreign and defense ministers Christian Pineau and Maurice Bourges-Manoury. The French, embarrassed by their failure to support their ally in the operation, found the Israelis deeply concerned about a Soviet threat. In this meeting, they substantially modified the initial understanding beyond a research reactor. Peres secured an agreement from France to assist Israel in developing a nuclear deterrent. After further months of negotiation, agreement was reached for an 18-megawatt (thermal) research reactor of the EL-3 type, along with plutonium separation technology. France and Israel signed the agreement in October 1957.15 Later the reactor was officially upgraded to 24 megawatts, but the actual specifications issued to engineers provided for core cooling ducts sufficient for up to three times this power level, along with a plutonium plant of similar capacity. Data from insider reports revealed in 1986 would estimate the power level at 125-150 megawatts.16 The reactor, not connected to turbines for power production, needed this increase in size only to increase its plutonium production. How this upgrade came about remains unknown, but Bourges-Maunoury, replacing Mollet as French prime minister, may have contributed to it.17 Shimon Peres, the guiding hand in the Israeli nuclear program, had a close relationship with Bourges-Maunoury and probably helped him politically.18

Why was France so eager to help Israel? DeMollet and then de Gaulle had a place for Israel within their strategic vision. A nuclear Israel could be a counterforce against Egypt in France's fight in Algeria. Egypt was openly aiding the rebel forces there. France also wanted to obtain the bomb itself. The United States had embargoed certain nuclear enabling computer technology from France. Israel could get the technology from America and pass it through to France. The U.S. furnished Israel heavy water, under the Atoms for Peace program, for the small research reactor at Soreq. France could use this heavy water. Since France was some years away from nuclear testing and success, Israeli science was an insurance policy in case of technical problems in France's own program.19 The Israeli intelligence community's knowledge of past French (especially Vichy) anti-Semitic transgressions and the continued presence of former National Socialist collaborators in French intelligence provided the Israelis with some blackmail opportunities.20 The cooperation was so close that Israel worked with France on the preproduction design of early Mirage jet aircraft, designed to be capable of delivering nuclear bombs.21

French experts secretly built the Israeli reactor underground at Dimona, in the Negev desert of southern Israel near Beersheba. Hundreds of French engineers and technicians filled Beersheba, the biggest town in the Negev. Many of the same contractors who built Marcoule were involved. SON (a French firm) built the plutonium separation plants in both France and Israel. The ground was broken for the EL-102 reactor (as it was known to France) in early 1958.

Israel used many subterfuges to conceal activity at Dimona. It called the plant a manganese plant, and rarely, a textile plant. The United States by the end of 1958 had taken pictures of the project from U-2 spy planes, and identified the site as a probable reactor complex. The concentration of Frenchmen was also impossible to hide from ground observers. In 1960, before the reactor was operating, France, now under the leadership of de Gaulle, reconsidered and decided to suspend the project. After several months of negotiation, they reached an agreement in November that allowed the reactor to proceed if Israel promised not to make nuclear weapons and to announce the project to the world. Work on the plutonium reprocessing plant halted. On 2 December 1960, before Israel could make announcements, the U.S. State Department issued a statement that Israel had a secret nuclear installation. By 16 December, this became public knowledge with its appearance in the New York Times. On 21 December, Ben-Gurion announced that Israel was building a 24-megawatt reactor "for peaceful purposes."22

Over the next year, relations between the U.S. and Israel became strained over the Dimona reactor. The U.S. accepted Israel's assertions at face value publicly, but exerted pressure privately. Although Israel allowed a cursory inspection by well known American physicists Eugene Wigner and I. I. Rabi, Prime Minister Ben-Gurion consistently refused to allow regular international inspections. The final resolution between the U.S. and Israel was a commitment from Israel to use the facility for peaceful purposes, and to admit a U.S. inspection team twice a year. These inspections began in 1962 and continued until 1969. Inspectors saw only the above ground part of the buildings, not the many levels underground and the visit frequency was never more than once a year. The above ground areas had simulated control rooms, and access to the underground areas was kept hidden while the inspectors were present. Elevators leading to the secret underground plutonium reprocessing plant were actually bricked over.23 Much of the information on these inspections and the political maneuvering around it has just been declassified.24

One interpretation of Ben-Gurion's "peaceful purposes" pledge given to America is that he interpreted it to mean that nuclear weapon development was not excluded if used strictly for defensive, and not offensive purposes. Israel's security position in the late fifties and early sixties was far more precarious than now. After three wars, with a robust domestic arms industry and a reliable defense supply line from the U.S., Israel felt much more secure. During the fifties and early sixties a number of attempts by Israel to obtain security guarantees from the U.S. to place Israel under the U.S. nuclear umbrella like NATO or Japan, were unsuccessful. If the U.S. had conducted a forward-looking policy to restrain Israel's proliferation, along with a sure defense agreement, we could have prevented the development of Israel's nuclear arsenal.

One common discussion in the literature concerns testing of Israeli nuclear devices. In the early phases, the amount of collaboration between the French and Israeli nuclear weapons design programs made testing unnecessary. In addition, although their main efforts were with plutonium, the Israelis may have amassed enough uranium for gun-assembled type bombs which, like the Hiroshima bomb, require no testing. One expert postulated, based on unnamed sources, that the French nuclear test in 1960 made two nuclear powers not one — such was the depth of collaboration between France and Israel.25 There were several Israeli observers at the French nuclear tests and the Israelis had "unrestricted access to French nuclear test explosion data."26 Israel also supplied essential technology and hardware.27 The French reportedly shipped reprocessed plutonium back to Israel as part of their repayment for Israeli scientific help.

However, this constant, decade long, French cooperation and support was soon to end and Israel would have to go it alone.

III. 1963-1973: Seeing the Project to Completion
Israel would soon need its own, independent, capabilities to complete its nuclear program. Only five countries had facilities for uranium enrichment: the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, France, and China. The Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation, or NUMEC, in Apollo, Pennsylvania was a small fuel rod fabrication plant. In 1965, the U.S. government accused Dr. Zalman Shapiro, the corporation president, of "losing" 200 pounds of highly enriched uranium. Although investigated by the Atomic Energy Commission, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and other government agencies and inquiring reporters, no answers were available in what was termed the Apollo Affair.29 Many remain convinced that the Israelis received 200 pounds of enriched uranium sometime before 1965.30 One source links Rafi Eitan, an Israeli Mossad agent and later the handler of spy Jonathan Pollard, with NUMEC.31 In the 1990s when the NUMEC plant was disassembled, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission found over 100 kilograms of plutonium in the structural components of the contaminated plant, casting doubt on 200 pounds going to Israel.32

The joint venture with France gave Israel several ingredients for nuclear weapons construction: a production reactor, a factory to extract plutonium from the spent fuel, and the design. In 1962, the Dimona reactor went critical; the French resumed work on the underground plutonium reprocessing plant, and completed it in 1964 or 1965. The acquisition of this reactor and related technologies was clearly intended for military purposes from the outset (not "dual-use"), as the reactor has no other function. The security at Dimona (officially the Negev Nuclear Research Center) was particularly stringent. For straying into Dimona's airspace, the Israelis shot down one of their own Mirage fighters during the Six-Day War. The Israelis also shot down a Libyan airliner with 104 passengers, in 1973, which had strayed over the Sinai.33 There is little doubt that some time in the late sixties Israel became the sixth nation to manufacture nuclear weapons. Other things they needed were extra uranium and extra heavy water to run the reactor at a higher rate. Norway, France, and the United States provided the heavy water and "Operation Plumbat" provided the uranium.

After the 1967 war, France stopped supplies of uranium to Israel. These supplies were from former French colonies of Gabon, Niger, and the Central Africa Republic.34 Israel had small amounts of uranium from Negev phosphate mines and had bought some from Argentina and South Africa, but not in the large quantities supplied by the French. Through a complicated undercover operation, the Israelis obtained uranium oxide, known as yellow cake, held in a stockpile in Antwerp. Using a West German front company and a high seas transfer from one ship to another in the Mediterranean, they obtained 200 tons of yellow cake. The smugglers labeled the 560 sealed oil drums "Plumbat," which means lead, hence "Operation Plumbat."35 The West German government may have been involved directly but remained undercover to avoid antagonizing the Soviets or Arabs.36 Israeli intelligence information on the National Socialist past of some West German officials may have provided the motivation — more blackmail.37

Norway sold 20 tons of heavy water to Israel in 1959 for use in an experimental power reactor. Norway insisted on the right to inspect the heavy water for 32 years, but did so only once, in April 1961, while it was still in storage barrels at Dimona. Israel simply promised [Concerning the reliability of such promises, please read up on the "Kol Nidre" recital on the eve of Yom Kippur: "All personal vows we are likely to make, all personal oaths and pledges we are likely to take between this Yom Kippur and the next Yom Kippur, we publicly renounce. Let them all be relinquished and abandoned, null and void, neither firm nor established. Let our personal vows, pledges and oaths be considered neither vows nor pledges nor oaths."] that the heavy water was for peaceful purposes. In addition, quantities much more than what would be required for the peaceful purpose reactors were imported. Norway either colluded or at the least was very slow to ask to inspect as the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) rules required.38 Norway and Israel concluded an agreement in 1990 for Israel to sell back 10.5 tons of the heavy water to Norway. Recent calculations reveal that Israel has used two tons and will retain eight tons more.39

Author Seymour Hersh, writing in the Samson Option says Prime Minister Levi Eshkol delayed starting weapons production even after Dimona was finished.40 The reactor operated and the plutonium collected, but remained unseparated. The first extraction of plutonium probably occurred in late 1965. By 1966, enough plutonium was on hand to develop a weapon in time for the Six-Day War in 1967. Some type of non-nuclear test, perhaps a zero yield or implosion test, occurred on November 2, 1966. After this time, considerable collaboration between Israel and South Africa developed and continued through the 1970s and 1980s. South Africa became Israel's primary supplier of uranium for Dimona. A Center for Nonproliferation Studies report lists four separate Israel-South Africa "clandestine nuclear deals." Three concerned yellowcake and one was tritium.41 Other sources of yellowcake may have included Portugal.42

Egypt attempted unsuccessfully to obtain nuclear weapons from the Soviet Union both before and after the Six-Day War. President Nasser received from the Soviet Union a questionable nuclear guarantee instead and declared that Egypt would develop its own nuclear program.43 His rhetoric of 1965 and 1966 about preventive war and Israeli nuclear weapons coupled with overflights of the Dimona rector contributed to the tensions that led to war. The Egyptian Air Force claims to have first overflown Dimona and recognized the existence of a nuclear reactor in 1965.44 Of the 50 American HAWK anti-aircraft missiles in Israeli hands, half ringed Dimona by 1965.45 Israel considered the Egyptian overflights of May 16, 1967 as possible pre-strike reconnaissance. One source lists such Egyptian overflights, along with United Nations peacekeeper withdrawal and Egyptian troop movements into the Sinai, as one of the three "tripwires" which would drive Israel to war.46 There was an Egyptian military plan to attack Dimona at the start of any war but Nasser vetoed it.47 He believed Israel would have the bomb in 1968.48 Israel assembled two nuclear bombs and ten days later went to war.49 Nasser's plan, if he had one, may have been to acquire and consolidate territorial gains before Israel had a nuclear option.50 He was two weeks too late.

The Israelis aggressively pursued an aircraft delivery system from the United States. President Johnson was less emphatic about nonproliferation than President Kennedy-or perhaps had more pressing concerns, such as Vietnam. He had a long history of both Jewish friends and pressing political contributors coupled with some first hand experience of ["]the Holocaust["], having toured concentration camps at the end of World War II.51 Israel pressed him hard for aircraft (A-4E Skyhawks initially and F-4E Phantoms later) and obtained agreement in 1966 under the condition that the aircraft would not be used to deliver nuclear weapons. The State Department attempted to link the aircraft purchases to continued inspection visits. President Johnson overruled the State Department concerning Dimona inspections.52 Although denied at the time, America delivered the F-4Es, on September 5, 1969, with nuclear capable hardware intact.53

The Samson Option states that Moshe Dayan gave the go-ahead for starting weapon production in early 1968, putting the plutonium separation plant into full operation. Israel began producing three to five bombs a year. The book Critical Mass asserts that Israel had two bombs in 1967, and that Prime Minister Eshkol ordered them armed in Israel's first nuclear alert during the Six-Day War.54 Avner Cohen in his recent book, Israel and the Bomb, agrees that Israel had a deliverable nuclear capability in the 1967 war. He quotes Munya Mardor, leader of Rafael, the Armament Development Authority, and other unnamed sources, that Israel "cobbled together" two deliverable devices.55

Having the bomb meant articulating, even if secretly, a use doctrine. In addition to the "Samson Option" of last resort, other triggers for nuclear use may have included successful Arab penetration of populated areas, destruction of the Israeli Air Force, massive air strikes or chemical/biological strikes on Israeli cities, and Arab use of nuclear weapons.56

In 1971, Israel began purchasing krytrons, ultra high-speed electronic switching tubes that are "dual-use," having both industrial and nuclear weapons applications as detonators. In the 1980s, the United States charged an American, Richard Smith (or Smyth), with smuggling 810 krytrons to Israel.57 He vanished before trial and reportedly lives outside Tel Aviv. The Israelis apologized for the action saying that the krytrons were for medical research ["Kol Nidre"!].58 Israel returned 469 of the krytrons but the rest, they declared, had been destroyed in testing conventional weapons. Some believe they went to South Africa.59 Smyth has also been reported to have been involved in a 1972 smuggling operation to obtain solid rocket fuel binder compounds for the Jericho II missile and guidance component hardware.60 Observers point to the Jericho missile itself as proof of a nuclear capability as it is not suited to the delivery of conventional munitions.61

On the afternoon of 6 October 1973, Egypt and Syria attacked Israel in a coordinated surprise attack, beginning the Yom Kippur War. Caught with only regular forces on duty, augmented by reservists with a low readiness level, Israeli front lines crumbled. By early afternoon on 7 October, no effective forces were in the southern Golan Heights and Syrian forces had reached the edge of the plateau, o