My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel (29 page)

He was born in Jerusalem in 1926. His first memories are bloody: during the Arab uprising of 1929, his father rescued wounded residents of the Old City, and when he returned home, the car seats were covered with blood, as were his suit and hands. In the 1930s his family moved to Rishon LeZion, where his father became a prosperous orange grower. Life in the agricultural colony was comfortable and happy. The orange grower’s spoiled son had little time for school. He preferred playing sports and developed an impressive physique that complemented his technological curiosity and extraordinary daring. At the age of eleven, he was already driving his family’s old Austin-Morris on the sands surrounding Rishon LeZion, and at the age of sixteen he won girls’ hearts in his father’s fancy new Buick. His adolescence did not have a memorable ideological dimension; it proceeded from game to game, from party to party, from girl to girl. Until, on a beautiful spring morning in 1943, his father was gunned down by an Arab while driving out to the family orange grove.

The murder of his father was a defining experience. It did not loosen its grip on him as he completed a chemical engineering degree at Haifa’s Technion, or when he excelled in a Haganah company commanders course. During the War of Independence, the memory of his father’s murder gave him the motivation and the cruel strength of an avenger. In December 1947, he received the command of a northern infantry
corps platoon, and in January 1948 he defended isolated kibbutzim in the eastern Galilee. In April and May 1948, he led the conquest of Palestinian villages in the eastern Galilee, and in June and July he fought the Egyptian army in the south. In October 1948 he drove Palestinian villagers from their homes in the north. During ten months of fierce fighting, the twenty-two-year-old platoon commander saw hundreds of Arabs killed by his men and buried dozens of his fellow soldiers, many of them friends. The war toughened him and hardened his heart. It taught him that he was resourceful, capable, and bold. At the end of the war, the platoon commander felt that there was no such thing as mission impossible. There was nothing in the world that could not be conquered.

After the war he worked as an engineer, and in 1951, he was called upon by Israel Dostrovsky. Dostrovsky led a double life: a brilliant scientist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, he was also the commander of a secret Israeli Army unit, Hemed Gimmel. Dostrovsky appointed his new recruit as the operations officer of Hemed Gimmel. The engineer’s first assignment was to conduct a mineral survey of the Negev to search for bitumen, phosphorus, and uranium. He remembers well the journey to the desert, especially the moment he broke open a desert rock with a geologist’s hammer to find a fish-scale-like substance glowing green in the night. But the decisive moment occurred on his return from the desert. Back in Rehovot, he met with Dostrovsky, who took from the safe in his office a big metal lump covered in wax paper. The professor placed it in the hands of the excited young major and asked him if he knew what it was. “Like lead, but much heavier than lead,” the young man answered. “Uranium, it must be uranium.” Both men were silent, but they both understood, without saying it explicitly, what the purpose of Hemed Gimmel was and what its mission was: to create a new bell jar for the Jewish state.

On the table in the Ramat Aviv living room is a stack of international scientific journals alongside a copy of Avner Cohen’s book. My host praises Cohen’s book, and in this manner he signals that we both know what we are talking about. We will conduct our conversation under the shroud of opacity.

“There was no general plan,” my host begins. “Professor Ernst
David Bergmann did his thing, and Israel Dostrovsky did his thing, and they both began to talk to the Norwegians and the French. I worked on uranium recovery from phosphate rock, Dostrovsky worked on heavy water, and the physicists studied nuclear science. But all of these activities were not coordinated, and they were not part of a consolidated work plan. They stemmed from the understanding of about a dozen people that this age was the nuclear age, and that Israel must be at its forefront; that if Israel fell behind the Arabs in the nuclear arms race, it would cease to exist. The Arabs were too many to defeat, and eventually they would be too strong to defeat. What happened in the Galilee villages in the spring of 1948 and in the fall of 1948 will not happen again. The clock was ticking. We were in a race against time. The citizens of this country didn’t understand, but we understood. The army generals didn’t get it, but we did. That’s why we rose every morning at five and worked until well after sundown. That’s why we read, studied, experimented, improvised, invented. Wherever a new capability appeared, we quickly harnessed it. We progressed step by step. And because it was the mid-1950s, and the spirit was that of the mid-1950s, no one asked where we were running to; everyone just kept running, running all the time. From the mid-1950s until the end of the 1960s, no one ever stopped running.”

The marathon began in Rehovot, where Dostrovsky’s team built the cumbersome Kleinschmidt apparatus that distilled heavy water in a unique process. The operation officer’s team brought phosphate rock from the Negev and developed various methods to extract uranium from it in vats of solvent. The distillation of water enriched with heavy oxygen (O18) was an immediate success. It turned 1950s Israel into one of the leaders in the field. But the uranium extraction was slow and arduous. Years of hard work yielded only a few grams. But both processes forged an initial capability in the field of nuclear research. Both aroused international interest and allowed Israel to enter international partnerships. In the laboratories of the Weizmann Institute, amid the orange groves, Israel acquired its nuclear foothold.

The first nuclear ties between Israel and France were brokered by Ernst David Bergmann in the late 1940s. In late 1956, Bergmann
signed a preliminary agreement with the French to build a nuclear reactor in Dimona. Shimon Peres forged the diplomatic alliance on nuclear matters and the French signed the binding agreements in 1957. But the two young men who nurtured and deepened the ties with the French, the undercover scientific attaché Shalhevet Freier and the operations officer of Hemed Gimmel, received few accolades. Working directly with the French Atomic Energy Commission (CEA), these two energetic men gained the trust of the French and fostered a scientific, technological, and strategic intimacy between Paris and Rehovot. In 1956 and 1957 the operations officer made frequent visits to Paris, hammering out an agreement with the French that required each side to keep the other fully apprised of its advancements. In 1957, my host moved to France in order to study the most critical stages of the nuclear process, and in 1958 he received access to France’s holy of holies, its most advanced atomic facility. From that moment on, everything was open to him, everything revealed. After completing his military service, the young operations officer of Hemed Gimmel became the engineer in charge of the most sensitive and most secret part of the French-Israeli nuclear program.

In the winter when I was born, the action returned to Israel. Seven years after he went down to the Negev in a command car in search of uranium, the engineer again went down to the desert in a command car in search of the best location to build the French-Israeli reactor. The survey team included eight Frenchmen and two Israelis. The Israelis detested each other. The pedantic Colonel Manes Pratt, former Ordnance Corps commander and an engineer by profession, was in charge of building Israel’s Los Alamos, while the brash and sometimes impetuous engineer was to be responsible for the most critical part of the future installation. But at this point in the plot, both Israeli men were minor characters. The decision makers were the French. And when the command car convoy reached triangulation point 472 on the Rotem Plateau, the French concurred that this was the spot. The Israeli nuclear reactor would be built fourteen kilometers southeast of the town of Dimona.

According to the official agreements, the reactor was to have been a modest affair of the type EL-102, with an output of only 24 megawatts. But according to Avner Cohen, on the ground, the reactor that the
French company Saint-Gobain built for Israel resembled the G1 reactor it had built in Marcoule for the French Republic. According to international publications, the output of the upgraded reactor in the desert was at least 24 megawatts. And according to those same publications, it included a secret plutonium separation plant that was not mentioned in the official agreements. I have reason to believe that during the three years he spent in France, the engineer probably took part in the planning of the most essential unit of the Israeli reactor. And during his frequent visits to Israel, he surely observed its construction. He may well have been the one who solved the severe problems that arose from the proximity of the separation plant to the reactor itself. Still, the engineer has no doubts about the matter: however significant his or Manes Pratt’s contributions might be, Dimona was France’s grand gesture toward Israel. It was the parting gift of a declining colonial power to the young frontier nation that the West erected in the East and was now leaving on its own.

Because of his intense rivalry with Manes Pratt, the engineer was not present in Dimona when the construction of the reactor was completed in 1961. And he was not present at the Negev Nuclear Research Center, as Dimona was officially known, when the French departed in 1962. Nor was he present when the reactor was activated and went critical at the end of 1963. In fact, during the first years of Dimona, the engineer watched from afar. But when he was appointed to the helm of Dimona in 1965, he discovered to his surprise that his most important work would be political.

By 1960, the United States knew that France was building a nuclear reactor for Israel on the Rotem Plateau. President John F. Kennedy was committed to the nonproliferation of nuclear weapons and was staunchly opposed to the production of nuclear weapons in Dimona. According to an agreement signed between Israel and the United States, American inspection teams were allowed to visit the desert reactor once a year, beginning in 1962. On their first four visits, the Americans discovered nothing. But with every visit, Israel’s posturing became less and less convincing to the Americans. By 1965, according to Avner Cohen and others, Israel faced its most dramatic juncture.

The engineer does not tell me so explicitly, but it is clear: before he turned forty, the role of the son of an orange grower from Rishon LeZion was to deal with the Americans. His mission was to win them over—pleasantly, calculatingly, elegantly—so that Dimona could continue to function. And in order to achieve this goal, according to non-Israeli sources, simulated control rooms were built, the entrances to underground levels were bricked up, and pigeon droppings were scattered around some buildings in which the forbidden installations were housed to give the impression that they were not in use.

The Saturdays on which the Americans visited Dimona were tense and exhausting. The national leadership followed from afar every moment of conversation between the engineer and the inquisitive inspectors. Every moment was critical, any mistake could be fatal. But the engineer’s self-confidence and charm worked wonders. The March 1966 inspection passed without incident, as did the following inspection in April 1967.

But there was one last hurdle for the Israelis to overcome. Immediately after he was appointed president in 1958, Charles de Gaulle made it clear that he adamantly opposed the nuclear cooperation between Israel and France. In 1960, he ordered its cessation. But pro-Israeli French ministers allowed the completion of the construction work in Dimona in 1961 and 1962. Even in 1965, when de Gaulle became hostile toward Israel, the French-Israeli nuclear cooperation continued. As I now learn, without French raw materials and French technology, Dimona could not have functioned throughout the 1960s. Senior members of the French Atomic Energy Commission understood this. They felt obligated toward Israel because of the young state’s scientific contributions, because of the Holocaust, and because of the intelligence it provided on Algeria. Even those among them who were not Jewish believed that Israel represented a historical act of justice and regarded it as a Western bulwark in the East. The engineer’s dramatic task was to maintain the alliance with the professional leaders of the French nuclear project who defied their president in order to make Dimona possible.

I want to question the engineer about the final stage of the process, but I know he will not answer my questions about production directly. After so many years of adamant silence, he will not yield easily now. So
I ask for another whisky. Outside the living room windows, evening descends.

In order to ease his way forward, I place in front of my host an almost inscrutable entry from the journal of Munia Mardor, the CEO of RAFAEL Advanced Defense Systems. It was published in his memoir, but its significance was only noticed some years after publication by Aluf Benn of
Haaretz
and was later quoted by Avner Cohen in his book. It is dated May 28, 1967:

The engineer laughs. He knows what Mardor wrote, but he dismisses it out of hand. He won’t speak about Dimona’s decisive moment, but he will say something about Dimona’s spirit. “We never trembled with excitement, we never opened bottles of champagne. We were physicists and chemists and engineers who did what we were supposed to do, without dramatic flourishes or lofty words.”

Yet the race was not finished. On May 17, 1967, shortly before the Six Day War, two Egyptian MiG 21 jets made a brief high-altitude reconnaissance flight over Dimona, causing alarm in Jerusalem. The engineer had to take extraordinary steps to protect his unique project. But in the year following the war, the engineer faced his greatest technological challenge—and opportunity. Post-1967 Israel felt a sense of urgency because of the extinction fears that the nation experienced in the weeks prior to the war. But because of the decisive victory, post-1967 Israel also had a new sense of omnipotence. The outcome of this mixture of fear and omnipotence was technological chutzpah. According to Avner
Cohen, during the engineer’s third year as director general of Dimona, the facility tripled its production capability.