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Charles Lucet was a senior French foreign ministry official who served as deputy ambassador in Washington D.C. in the late 1950s and later became ambassador in 1965. At a 1962 Washington dinner party, he was publicly reprimanded by John A. McCone, then Central Intelligence Agency director, for France's role in the Israeli bomb. When McCone asked if France was building a reprocessing plant for the Israelis, Lucet replied with France's public position: "No, we are building a reactor." McCone then turned his back on Lucet and did not speak to him for the rest of the evening, a pointed rebuff given France's high standing with President John F. Kennedy and his wife.1
Footnotes
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Hersh, Seymour M. The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy. Random House, 1991. Chapter 9. ↩︎