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Zalman Mordecai Shapiro was an American Jew and owner of the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (NUMEC), a privately owned nuclear enriching plant in Apollo, Pennsylvania. | 1920-05-12 | 2016-07-16 | Canton, Ohio |
Zalman Mordecai Shapiro was an American Jew and owner of the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (NUMEC), a privately owned nuclear enriching plant in Apollo, Pennsylvania. He was suspected by the Central Intelligence Agency and others of having smuggled more than two hundred pounds of weapons-grade uranium to Israel, enough for four bombs. This alleged diversion was a major factor in Carl E. Duckett's CIA estimates of Israel's nuclear arsenal.1
Hersh writes that Shapiro was hounded by these suspicions for twenty-five years, that no significant evidence of a diversion was found, and that the CIA and Atomic Energy Commission never learned that Shapiro had a secret life, meeting and befriending many of Israel's senior nuclear scientists, including Ernst David Bergmann, and conducting sensitive, legitimate missions for Israel. He was asked by Israel to devise a rapid and accurate method of determining whether water had been contaminated with toxic materials, and also advised on how to prevent water loss in the National Water Carrier.1
Shapiro's business involved the chemical isolation and recovery of enriched uranium from dirt and scrap, a process that inherently generated some loss, known as MUF (material unaccounted for). The AEC eventually determined that over two hundred pounds of enriched uranium could not be accounted for from NUMEC, leading to suspicions of diversion. Hersh concludes that intensive FBI surveillance and investigation found no significant evidence that Shapiro diverted uranium, and that the missing uranium ended up in the air and water of Apollo and in the plant's ducts, tubes and floors.1
In 1967, Shapiro and his partners were forced to merge their interest in NUMEC into the Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO) due to the continuing controversy. Shapiro continued to run the plant. He convened meetings of American and Israeli scientists to discuss protecting Israel's National Water Carrier from terrorists, and his company provided specialized small power sources for the security of waterways, all approved for export by the Commerce Department.1
Records of 1965 to 1968
An August 10, 1965 meeting of Atomic Energy Commission commissioners with Shapiro and others from NUMEC concerned inventory differences in highly enriched uranium detected earlier that year by the AEC's Oak Ridge office; Shapiro "admitted that some waste was generated by work on Navy fuels" and noted that in earlier years NUMEC had paid the AEC up to $1 million for material losses. A letter of February 14, 1966 from the AEC General Manager, R. L. Hollingsworth, to the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy stated that an audit of November 1965 found 178 kilograms of U-235 unaccounted for since the start of operations at Apollo, of which 93.8 kilograms could not be ascribed to any known loss mechanism. Minutes of an AEC briefing of the same date record the staff view that "if collusion between a shipper and a foreign government were assumed it would be theoretically possible to ship material abroad in excess of the amounts indicated in the company's records," and that the Commission could not say unequivocally that the material had not been diverted.2
An FBI report of June 21, 1966 summarized an interview of Shapiro by the Pittsburgh office on June 15, 1966, made at the AEC's request, on whether he should have registered as an agent of a foreign government; Shapiro described the formation of ISORAD, a joint venture of NUMEC and the Israel Atomic Energy Commission, and meetings with the American ambassador to Israel and with Joseph Eyal, science attache of the Israeli embassy. A General Accounting Office report to the Joint Committee of June 20, 1967 stated that cumulative losses of U-235 through December 31, 1966 totaled about 260 kilograms, or about 1.2 percent of receipts.2
On April 2, 1968, Richard Helms wrote to Attorney General Ramsey Clark asking for a "discreet intelligence investigation of an all source nature of Dr. Shapiro in order to establish the nature and extent of his relationship with the Government of Israel." An FBI memorandum of May 6, 1968 from Cartha DeLoach to Clyde Tolson expressed misgivings, and J. Edgar Hoover wrote on it: "OK, but I doubt advisability of getting into this."2 On September 6, 1968 the AEC's New York security office reported that NUMEC had asked for a visit by four Israelis to Apollo on September 10: Avraham Hermoni, scientific counselor at the Israeli embassy in Washington; Ephraim Biegun and Abraham Bendor of the Israeli Department of Electronics; and Rafael Eitan of the Israeli Ministry of Defense. The National Security Archive identifies Hermoni as the LAKAM station chief in Washington, Biegun and Bendor as Shin Bet officers, and Eitan as deputy chief of operations of the Mossad, who organized the 1968 Plumbat operation that diverted natural uranium oxide from Europe to Israel.2
In 1977, Jody Powell, President Jimmy Carter's press secretary, publicly announced that investigations had "failed to reveal" a diversion of uranium to Israel. However, Carl E. Duckett and John L. Hadden continued to push their suspicions, leading to further investigations. By the early 1990s, Duckett essentially recanted many of his previous assertions, stating he knew of nothing to indicate Shapiro was guilty. Despite this, many journalists continued to believe Shapiro diverted uranium for the Israeli bomb.1
Footnotes
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Hersh, Seymour M. The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy. Random House, 1991. Chapter 14, 18. ↩︎
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National Security Archive, "The NUMEC Affair: Did Highly Enriched Uranium from the U.S. Aid Israel's Nuclear Weapons Program?" (November 2, 2016), Documents 1, 2, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10, drawing on U.S. Department of Energy archives (AEC Secretariat Collection), FBI FOIA file 117-2564, the Comptroller General's report in the Morris Udall Papers (University of Arizona) and ISCAP Appeal No. 2013-062. https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/nuclear-vault/2016-11-02/numec-affair-did-highly-enriched-uranium-us-aid-israels-nuclear-weapons-program The identifications of the four Israelis and of Eitan's role in Plumbat are the posting's commentary. ↩︎