1960 Intelligence Report Said Israeli Nuclear Site Was for Weapons

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1960 Intelligence Report Said Israeli Nuclear Site Was for Weapons

Washington, D.C., December 17, 2024 - A recently declassified Joint Atomic Energy Intelligence Committee (JAEIC) report from December 1960 is the first and only known U.S. intelligence report to correctly and unequivocally state that Israel's Dimona nuclear project would include a reprocessing plant for plutonium production and was weapons related. All known, subsequent U.S. intelligence products treated the reprocessing issue as unsettled until the late 1960s, when Israel reached the threshold of a nuclear weapons capability and the U.S. and Israel reached a secret agreement to accommodate its status as an undeclared nuclear power.

The newly released intelligence report is one of 20 documents featured in a new Electronic Briefing Book published today by the National Security Archive, the latest in a series of declassified document collections edited by Archive senior analyst William Burr and Professor Avner Cohen (Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey) concerning U.S. policy toward the Israeli nuclear weapons program and the complex problems that it raised for U.S. diplomacy during the 1960s and 1970s.

An equally intriguing, declassified U.S. intelligence analysis revealed that several Israeli sources had informed the U.S. embassy in February 1967 that Israel "either has or is about to complete" a reprocessing plant at Dimona, and that "the Dimona reactor has been operated at full capacity." The bottom line was that Israel was "6-8 weeks" from the bomb. While the intelligence arm of the State Department could neither prove nor disprove those dramatic allegations, it evaluated some of them as "plausible" and urged the next inspection team in April 1967 to explore them. This is the first known document that treated the possibility that Israel was systematically deceiving the United States about Dimona as a factual claim.

Also published today are documents from the 1970s that illustrate how the U.S. government accommodated itself to the reality of Israel's nuclear weapons capabilities. In early 1978, after the CIA mistakenly released an intelligence estimate that affirmed that Israel had produced nuclear weapons, Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin asked whether it was true that Israel had such weapons. As his reply, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance handed Dobrynin a "non-paper" affirming that the U.S. "accept[s0 [Israel's] assurances" that it did not possess nuclear weapons and "will not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons in the Middle East." Another document from early 1978, a State Department report on nuclear proliferation risks posed by various countries ("the Dirty Dozen"), indicated why Washington had abandoned pressure on Israel to sign the Nonproliferation Treaty: "The high US priority in finding a peace settlement in the area is overriding and inhibits effective pursuit of non-proliferation objectives in Israel."

The documents in this publication are from the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and were discovered among the records of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy (RG 128), the Atomic Energy Commission (RG 326), the State Department (RG 59), and at the Lyndon Johnson Presidential Library. Almost all of them are the result of Mandatory Declassification Review (MDR) requests or Indexing on Demand requests filed by the National Security Archive.

New U.S. Documents About the Israeli Nuclear Program
William Burr and Avner Cohen, editors

From the early 1960s to the 1970s, the U.S. government's approach to Israel's nuclear weapons program shifted markedly. During the 1960s, concerns about nonproliferation and geopolitical stability in the Middle East animated worries that Israel would use its nuclear reactor at Dimona to produce plutonium for the bomb. Illustrating that point are recently declassified documents about the inspections of Dimona, where U.S. government officials searched for signs of plutonium production. By 1969, declassified documents indicate that nonproliferation gave way to a bilateral secret deal between President Richard Nixon and Prime Minister Golda Meir under which Washington accommodated itself to Israel's undeclared nuclear weapons status.

The AEC report and other recently declassified documents from the records of Congress's Joint Committee on Atomic Energy illustrate how Washington began to discover the existence of the Dimona reactor. In June 1960, officials from the AEC visited Israel to inspect the newly constructed Soreq research reactor that Washington had provided under the Atoms for Peace program. Everything checked out—Israel was fully in compliance with the safeguards. Yet a meeting with U.S officials at the Embassy in Tel Aviv brought unexpected news: "reports of a joint Israeli-French team doing something in atomic energy in or near Beersheba." The AEC officials said they had heard nothing about it and would try to learn more from their intelligence staff in Washington. This new document relates to other material on the discovery of Dimona published in a previous posting in 2015.

As mentioned, one of the new documents is a Joint Atomic Energy Intelligence Committee report from December 1960. Its statements that the French-Israeli nuclear project in the Negev Desert would include a "plutonium separation plant" and that the Dimona reactor was unequivocally for weapons purposes were rare claims. To the knowledge of the editors, this is the first and only U.S. intelligence document that categorically and explicitly maintained that the Dimona site would include a plant to separate plutonium from spent reactor fuel for the purposes of making weapons. Subsequent declassified reports treated a reprocessing plant as something that did not yet exist and said that its construction would probably require a new political decision by the Israeli leadership.

Other declassified archival documents on the discovery of the Dimona reactor focus on the irritated reaction of Prime Minister David Ben Gurion to Eisenhower administration statements and inquiries about the reactor and Israeli purposes. For example, Atomic Energy Commission director John McCone's public comments on "Meet the Press" that Israel had not informed Washington about Dimona angered Ben-Gurion, who told U.S. Ambassador Ogden Reid in early 1961 that "we didn't deserve it and we will not accept such treatment," adding, "we are not a satellite of America... and will never be a satellite." Ambassador Reid reported that he had discussed with Ben-Gurion U.S. intelligence work in Israel and told him that "there was no spying going on." Reid reviewed with Ben-Gurion the Embassy's efforts to establish a "working relationship" between the two countries but noted that Israel had not helped matters by failing to "inform us of the reactor—particularly in light of the economic assistance we had been providing."[1]

Other new documents include the detailed reports of U.S inspection visits to the Dimona reactor in 1965 and 1966. To avoid contention with their hosts, the inspections were referred to as "visits" but were as detailed as the Israelis would permit. Published for the first time, the documents illustrate the U.S. government's concern during the 1960s that the Israeli nuclear program was a proliferation risk that made it necessary to determine whether the reactor represented a nuclear weapons project, especially whether there were any indications that the Israelis already had or were trying to build a plant for converting spent reactor fuel into plutonium for weapons.

The AEC team that inspected the Dimona reactor in 1966 was wary enough to point out the possibility of Israeli deception: "the team may have been deliberately deceived but it is believed that this is unlikely." The inspection report pointed out reasons why trickery was unlikely, but the team did not realize that deception was indeed ongoing and systematic. Not only that, sometime in 1966 Israel had started to produce weapons-grade plutonium and on the eve of the 1967 Six Day War as a matter of the utmost emergency Israel assembled, for the first time in its history, two or three nuclear devices. This preparation was for a demonstration in the event of the worst-case scenario. It was then, for all intents and purposes, that Israel had crossed the threshold and become a nuclear capable state.[2]

Another key declassified document also shows concerns about the possibility of deception in Dimona. A March 1967 State Department intelligence report, significantly excised by the CIA, analyzed striking allegations made, apparently by an Israeli sources, to the US embassy in Tel Aviv, that the Israelis had or were about to install a reprocessing plant to produce plutonium at Dimona and had been operating the Dimona reactor at high capacity for that purpose. The drafters of the report (at least the text that has been declassified) clearly saw the new information as dramatic but were reluctant to draw strong conclusions. Instead, they suggested that the next AEC visit to Dimona look closely at the problem of reprocessing. But the April 1967 inspection learned nothing new.

The documents from the 1960s are from a period when nonproliferation concerns had a significant impact on U.S policy toward Israel, although never to the point of an open clash or confrontation. The Israelis recognized U.S. apprehensions, but that would not stop them from secretly moving forward in developing a nuclear weapons capability, including the secret reprocessing of spent fuel. Prime Minister Levi Eshkol and other top officials were not about to tell Washington that they were moving toward the nuclear threshold, much less take any open step in that direction, although U.S. intelligence discerned that the Israelis were making progress.

A group of declassified documents from the Carter administration illustrated the volte face taken by the U.S. government during the 1970s. President Richard Nixon gave low priority to the NPT and proliferation concerns in general but high priority to freedom of action for regional security partners. Consistent with this, in September 1969 Nixon held a one-on-one meeting with Prime Minister Golda Meir where they reached a highly secret understanding that the U.S. would halt pressure on the nuclear issue, for example by ending requests to inspect Israeli nuclear facilities and for Israel to sign the NPT.[3]

While no direct record of the Meir-Nixon meeting has ever surfaced, it can be inferred that the two leaders agreed to keep Israel's nuclear weapons status secret. Israel would not test nuclear weapons or declare that it had them. In any official statements about its capabilities, it would use language that was ambiguous or what Avner Cohen has called "opaque." Washington would accept and support Israel's declarations that it did not have nuclear weapons and that it would not be the "first to introduce nuclear weapons" in the region. That wording had been the official Israeli position since the early 1960s, when Ben-Gurion, Eshkol, Shimon Peres, and other top officials formulated it.[4]

The Nixon-Meir understanding outlived its architects. According to one account, at the request of the Israeli government in 1977, Henry Kissinger briefed Jimmy Carter on the Nixon-Meir understanding.[5] While Kissinger met and spoke with President Carter several times during August 1977, it was mainly in connection with the Panama Canal Treaty. What is particularly telling, however, is that Kissinger met with President Carter on 25 January 1978. After a twenty-minute private discussion in the Oval Office, they had lunch with Rosalynn Carter.[6] Kissinger's visit was on the eve of media coverage of an apparently mistaken CIA response to a FOIA request by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). The Agency declassified most of the main conclusions of the 1974 Special National Intelligence Estimate (SNIE), "Prospects for Further Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons." One of the conclusions was that "Israel already has produced nuclear weapons," or at least there was a "belief" that Israel had done so.

The CIA release apparently violated one of the operational aspects of the Nixon-Meir understanding: that the US would never acknowledge in public Israel's possession of nuclear weapons. Questions from newspaper reporters about the SNIE may have encourage Israeli diplomats to contact Kissinger and ask for his intervention. Certainly, the U.S. and overseas press covered the FOIA release, including the fact that it had been a "mistake" and that a CIA official had worried that it could cause an "international incident."[7]

The press coverage motivated the U.S. Embassy in Israel to ask Washington for instructions in the event of questions from the media. The State Department immediately provided guidance by summarizing the "strong" statements by the Government of Israel that it "will not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East" and declarations by Prime Minister Rabin in 1974 and 1975 that "we have no nuclear weapons" and that "Israel is a non-nuclear country." According to the Department, those were "authoritative statements" and "we have nothing to add." That guidance was consistent with the Nixon-Meir understanding, and the Israeli Embassy would not have taken exception to it.

If Kissinger did brief President Carter about the Nixon-Meir understanding it is hard to know how decisive it was. The Carter administration was aware that Israel had full nuclear weapons capabilities [See Document 13], but during its first year, as it pursued its nonproliferation agenda, it studiously avoided any pressure on Israel. Nevertheless, any Kissinger briefing on the Nixon-Meir deal may have been a useful reminder of the importance of the issue and the approach that Carter's immediate predecessors had taken to Israel's nuclear program.

In the days and weeks that followed the press stories, the Carter administration followed the basics of the Nixon-Meir understanding by validating Israeli denials that it had the bomb. A test case may have been the curiosity expressed by a top Soviet diplomat about the document not long after the press stories appeared. On 21 February 1978, Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin handed over a "non-paper" to Secretary of State Cyrus Vance in which Moscow asked the U.S. to clarify the matter: "to what extent are true [sic] the reports ... that U.S. government agencies came to the conclusion that Israel is in possession of nuclear weapons." Vance observed that the Israelis had denied they had the bomb and that the CIA was divided on the matter but agreed to review the Soviet paper.

A few weeks later when Dobrynin asked about the State Department's response to his query, Vance went somewhat beyond the usual position by acknowledging that "our intelligence community agreed that Israel had the capability to make nuclear weapons, [but] it was split on the question of whether it had already done so." In response, Dobrynin said that he "had 'a higher opinion of the US intelligence people' than the answer implied," suggesting his doubts about a "split."

On 16 March 1978, Vance provided Dobrynin with a non-paper that included a declaration that "we accepted Israeli assurances they had not produced nuclear weapons." The Department also accepted Israeli assurance that they will "not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons in the Middle East." Plainly skeptical, Dobrynin "persistently questioned whether we really believe what the Israelis said." Vance replied that "there was no evidence that Israeli assurances were untrue." In this example of government-to-government dialogue about Israel's nuclear status, the Department upheld Israel's posture of nuclear opacity. This raises questions over how much information – how precise and how detailed – the U.S. government itself had about the Israeli nuclear program at that time.

The posting concludes with a long State Department report on countries of nuclear proliferation concern, "The Dirty Dozen," (actually eleven) that included an assessment of Israel's nuclear weapons capabilities and the policy and diplomatic issues that they raised. While it is likely that the authors of the report did not know of the Nixon-Meir understanding, they recognized that Israel's nuclear program was in a special category that made it impervious to the usual diplomatic pressures, not least because "the high US priority in finding a peace settlement in the area is overriding and inhibits effective pursuit of non-proliferation objectives in Israel."

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More needs to be learned about what the U.S. government exactly knew and when about the Israeli nuclear weapons program and how policymakers assessed any new knowledge. As with any especially sensitive and controversial foreign policy issue, records on that topic are not easily declassified and invariably go through a prolonged security review. Some requests take years to process; the records of the JCAE in today's posting were requested in 2012 and released in September 2024. Other requests relating to Israel's nuclear activities were denied altogether and await a lengthy appeals review process. Important State Department archival records from the late 1960s sit in the appeal in the queue of the overloaded Interagency Classification Appeals Panel (ISCAP) and it is quite possible that ISCAP will never get to it because of insufficient staffing. Also bottled up in the declassification and appeals process are the reports on the Dimona visits in 1967, 1968 and 1969.

Also highly relevant is that there appears to be a secret regulation warning current or previous federal government employees with disciplinary action if they release information concerning Israeli nuclear weapons activities.[8] To what extent this prohibition relates to declassification of historical archival material is not altogether clear, but certainly the Defense Department is determined to raise objections to declassification of even 60-year-old or older material concerning U.S. policy and the state of knowledge about the Israeli nuclear program. Under the current executive order on classified national security information, the Pentagon has freedom of action to do so; whether that will change in the foreseeable future remains to be seen.

FIND THE DOCUMENTS AT THIS LINK:  https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/nuclear-vault/2024-12-17/1960-intelligence-report-said-israeli-nuclear-site-was?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=0f1b97d5-4036-4ba6-b6c3-ecbcb2c7b88e