Spies Against Armageddon (28 page)

While the Swiss spy was bitter, Blumberg’s reputation within the intelligence community grew to mythic proportions. Few knew exactly what he did, but senior operatives and defense staffers knew he was good at it. Only the highest officials linked Blumberg with Dimona and atomic weapons.

Another pillar supporting the nuclear project and working closely with Blumberg was a young, ambitious Israeli—Arnon Milchan—who, years later, would be one of Hollywood’s wealthiest movie producers.

Born in 1945, Milchan inherited a small chemical and fertilizers business from his father and expanded it in the 1960s and ‘70s by winning licenses to represent such global giants as America’s DuPont. He also brokered deals for defense contractors and was paid sizeable fees.

In the late 1960s, Milchan had a key role in doing the CIA a favor in pre-revolutionary Iran. The Americans were hoping to build a large listening post there. The Shah was among the regional players extremely impressed by Israel’s swift victory over Nasser and Arab nationalism in 1967. Thus, he was receptive to a request by Milchan and other Israelis to allow the CIA to build its listening post on Iranian soil: a billion-dollar collection of dishes, antennas, and computers to harvest electronic intelligence (elint) from the nearby Soviet Union. As part of the deal, the facility would occasionally help the Shah by turning its “ears” toward Iran’s neighbors—Pakistan and Iraq.

Milchan, who was in his early 20s, also earned commissions from American companies providing the elint equipment.

His “recruiter” for Israel’s nuclear project was Peres, who introduced Milchan to Blumberg. Despite a generation gap between the latter two and their different personalities—Milchan was funny and talkative, while Blumberg was quiet and monkish—they struck up a friendship. “The only times I have ever seen Blumberg smile,” said another Lakam operative, “was when he was with Milchan.”

They also got a lot of secret business done. In 1972, guided precisely by Blumberg and Israel’s atomic commission, Milchan was tasked with purchasing blueprints for centrifuges. Israeli scientists wanted to build their own devices for spinning uranium to weapons-grade potency.

That would give Israel another avenue, enriching uranium—and not only the reactor route—for making nuclear arms.

The Dimona project was mostly based around the reactor, which Israeli engineers had made much more powerful since the French initially built it. The reactor turned uranium in fuel rods into more radioactive and volatile plutonium. Plutonium bombs were typically smaller—requiring less than five kilograms of fissile material each, compared with over 25 kilograms for enriched uranium bombs. Plutonium devices were more apt to be miniaturized, to be the warheads on missiles.

Milchan was instructed to befriend a corrupt scientist at Urenco, a joint British-Dutch-German consortium that produced the centrifuges. With his charm and a lavish offer of $250,000, Milchan was successful.

As agreed, the scientist brought the blueprints to his home for a weekend and left his back door unlocked. Israelis from the Caesarea operations department subtly surrounded the house, and Mossad photographers copied the thousands of documents in a matter of hours. The scientist and his wife returned home, and on Monday he returned the documents to his office without arousing any suspicions.

Based on the drawings, Israel was able to design and build gas centrifuges. They were installed in Dimona and soon started enriching gaseous uranium hexafluoride, to produce fissile material for bombs.

Only two years later, Abdul Qader Khan would steal the very same blueprints. He was a Pakistani nuclear scientist, carrying out research at the Urenco consortium. A.Q. Khan returned home, built centrifuges, plotted the procurement of uranium, and was hailed there as “the father of the Pakistani nuclear bomb.” He is even more notorious as the driving force behind notions of “an Islamic bomb,” and Khan rightly became known as the world’s biggest nuclear proliferator. He sold his knowledge to Iran, Libya, and perhaps other countries in the late 1990s.

Israel, in the meantime, kept upgrading and improving the centrifuges at Dimona to make them more efficient.

Yet, the old ones also proved to be of great value. In 2008, they would serve as a test bed for the computer worm invented by a joint Mossad-Aman-CIA operation: the malicious Stuxnet virus planted inside Iran’s computers, which were controlling a Urenco-type centrifuge array. The Iranian machinery would be severely damaged, and that would be a significant setback to an enemy’s program seen as highly threatening. (
See Chapter 1
.)

In appreciation of Milchan’s success in getting Israel its own centrifuges, he was one of the very few Israelis—outside a tight circle of cabinet ministers, selected members of parliament, and senior military personnel—to be honored with a tour of the Dimona facility.

In 1973, Milchan launched a chain of business decisions that would bring Israel sophisticated triggers for nuclear bombs. These were krytrons: a type of high-speed switch, resembling the kind of cathode tubes old radios had, costing only $75 each but requiring a U.S. government license to be exported.

Milchan persuaded an engineer at Rockwell, the American defense contractor, to start a company in California. Milchan promised Richard Smyth that the new firm, Milco, would get plenty of orders. Milchan and his friends in Tel Aviv would see to that. For years, Lakam sent Milco lists—often using codewords for nuclear-related items—and Smyth was earning handsome commissions for shipping the parts to Israel.

In 1985, federal agents raided Milco and charged Smyth with illegally exporting more than 800 krytrons to Israel. Milchan, despite obvious ties to Milco, was not charged; apparently, that was because Peres, his longtime patron, persuaded Reagan administration officials not to prosecute Milchan.

Milchan told two authors, writing a book about him, that he had not violated any American laws. He added that he had been “ordered” to cut off all contact with Smyth, who fled to Europe and could never get Milchan or Lakam to return his phone calls. Israel’s defense ministry did send Smyth money for several years.

Smyth, after almost 15 years, was located by U.S. authorities and extradited from Spain. He was sentenced to 40 months in prison, and in 2010—when he was 80—the two authors found him, practically broke, living in a trailer park in California.

Milchan continued to do very well. He produced many hit movies, dividing his time between Los Angeles and Tel Aviv and unceasingly helping Israel with its secret intelligence and defense requirements.

Similar to Sakharov, he refused to accept any payment from Israel for his assignments on behalf of Lakam, but many of his missions were indirectly rewarding. Peres, Blumberg, and Moshe Dayan introduced Milchan to international leaders and key security officials, and he was able to make highly profitable deals with monarchist Iran, the isolated government of Taiwan, and the doomed apartheid regime of South Africa. He invested in various enterprises in Iran, which he wisely sold about a year before the Shah’s downfall in 1979.

When deals involved products delivered to Israel, Milchan put the commissions into a huge slush fund: millions in cash that Israeli intelligence could use for special assignments. Milchan controlled the checkbook.

Patriots who donated their time and energies to the cause, such as Milchan and Sakharov, helped Israel acquire what it needed to be an undeclared nuclear power.

The scientific and technical breakthroughs that made it possible for Israel to build an atomic bomb came—by coincidence—just before the Six-Day War of June 1967. Only a few people knew that the Jewish state became the sixth country to achieve nuclear weapons capability, joining the United States, the Soviet Union, France, Britain, and China in that exclusive club.

Israel’s undeclared status nearly came into play during the three-week crisis that led up to the outbreak of war on June 5.

Israeli political leaders and military chiefs were very concerned by the expulsion of United Nations peacekeepers from Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. It was also impossible to dismiss Cairo’s raucous psychological campaign that claimed Arab armies would smash Israel and throw the Jews into the sea. Fears of another Holocaust were fueled by the fact that Egypt’s military had just used chemical weapons in Yemen’s civil war.

Against that background, some defense ministry officials and scientists in Tel Aviv deliberated over nuclear strategy. Ben-Gurion had insisted on developing the world’s most dangerous weapons, but no one had clearly decided when they might be used. Forty-five years later, the results of these discussions continue to be secret and, according to sources close to the participants, surprisingly ambiguous.

The emerging picture is that Rafael, the official Israeli company for developing armaments, mobilized all of its top engineers and technicians during the weeks of crisis in 1967. According to Lt. General Tzvi Tzur, a former IDF chief of staff who was then a special adviser to the defense ministry, those men and women “worked around the clock and neared total collapse” to assemble Israel’s first nuclear device.

Tzur told oral historians: “A committee of two was set up, in the days leading to the war, to connect a few wires.” This was a big bomb, not ready to be fit into a missile or even dropped from an airplane.

Around the same time, the commander of the Sayeret Matkal commando unit, Lt. Colonel Dov Tamari, was summoned to headquarters for a meeting with a general. Tamari was ordered to prepare a team of Sayeret soldiers to fly by helicopter into the Sinai. They would be carrying “a thing,” which the general did not specify.

The mission sketched out would have the troops place Israel’s first nuclear bomb and some kind of detonation mechanism on a high peak—probably for maximal psychological effect choosing Mount Sinai, where the Bible says Moses received the Ten Commandments. If Egypt’s army, already massing in the Sinai, were to cross into Israel and threaten Tel Aviv or other major cities, the Israelis would shock the invaders by turning the mountain into little more than rubble under a mushroom cloud.

The plan was dropped, in large part because Israel won the June 1967 war so easily.

In fact, even as Israel secretly built nuclear weapons, it did not test any of them until 1979. Scientists and engineers did not feel the need to conduct a test explosion, largely because Blumberg’s Lakam obtained from “assets” in France the full results of French nuclear tests. The Israelis were able to use the measurements and observations to calculate the quantities, components, and bomb structure that would yield a viable nuclear device that could be stored and transported safely.

As technology advanced, Israel was able to test its nuclear bombs, in a sense, by using computer simulations—the method generally used by the United States to examine and update its huge arsenal.

In September 1979, according to American government scientists whose monitoring equipment detected a flash and electromagnetic signals emitted by a nuclear explosion, Israel did conduct a test—over the Atlantic Ocean, just west of South Africa. Israeli officials stubbornly refused ever to confirm publicly that they worked with South Africa’s all-white regime on the test; but Blumberg’s Lakam would have been in charge of providing secure transport for an Israeli bomb to a South African naval base, arranging for IAEC members to be present, and taking steps to prevent public knowledge of the test.

Nuclear cooperation was the zenith of the secret military ties between two unlikely bedfellows: Israel, the homeland for Jews who suffered anti-Semitism and racism, working together with a government based on white supremacist apartheid. The unholy alliance prompted worldwide condemnation. Israel justified the policy as a national-security necessity.

When the 1979 test took place, Israel already had missiles with nuclear warheads. These were Jericho ground-to-ground missiles, an Israeli product based on models sold by France in the late 1950s.

Yet, the precise art of fitting a nuclear warhead onto a Jericho came from the United States. Lakam’s agents and Israeli air force personnel on training trips to America managed to obtain or steal details of the warhead structure for the U.S.-made medium-range Pershing 2 missile. The Israelis used that as a model.

Lakam tried, on occasion, to expand its horizons. Thus, Blumberg gathered a few nuclear scientists in the mid-1970s to form his own research department. He asked them to study India’s nuclear program, using almost entirely open sources. The report had some interesting observations about proliferation and about weapons development by a nation with widespread poverty, but nothing that would affect Israeli decision making.

The Lakam research department did not last long, largely because other Israeli intelligence agencies felt that it was wasting resources by writing reports on topics already well covered.

Lakam, for the few who knew its true business, could not really escape the fact that its main mission was to be a theft contractor for all of the Israeli government’s military, technical, and science requirements.

Blumberg would object to the label, but he was Israel’s master thief. Israel’s perception of its own needs constantly prompted planning for getting things done through secrecy and deception, and nowhere was this truer than in the nuclear program.

Based on a prevailing sentiment that never expired, Israel took what it felt it needed whenever purchase or negotiation failed to do the trick. Lakam’s acquisitive business flourished, bordering on the illegal or even crossing that border.

As the 20th century gave way to the 21st, Binyamin Blumberg was still secretive about the work he had done for Israel’s security. Old and poor, alone in his fourth-floor walk-up near Tel Aviv’s City Hall, he wondered how he had been abandoned. His health deteriorated as he reached his late 80s, and he rarely left his austere apartment, but it was apparent that he used to be a handsome, tall man.

The name on his building’s mailbox said Vered, and the people who knew him as Blumberg—who had worked with him on Israel’s most sensitive and secretive projects—hardly ever got in touch any more. Perhaps on major Jewish holidays, a few might call and ask him how he was doing. Yet the monkish bureaucrat always kept his private life to himself. He rarely had friends over to his home and hardly ever socialized.