Chapter 2

A Secret Place, A Secret Service

Dimona. It stands in a parched wilderness of rock and scrub. Its dome-shaped centrepiece might be taken for a basilica; closer inspection shows it to be more like a giant soccer ball. Then there are the slender chimneys, climbing to three times the height of the dome, and the squat buildings clustering round, and the fence laden with warning signs that encircles the whole area. It is a stark intrusion upon its desert surroundings which have remained largely unchanged since Biblical times. It is as though some new race had landed there, and built a colony to survive an alien environment.

It is not easy to get any view of the Dimona Centre. It is only forty miles away from the ancient and bustling town of Beersheba, but the casual visitor heading southwest on the road into the Negev Desert will be intercepted by Israeli patrols before he sights anything more than the tips of Dimona’s chimneys. Polite but insistent, the soldiers will turn him back the way he has come. Even if he can avoid the patrols and somehow pass undetected through the invisible electronic barriers that crisscross the desert, he will be halted by the bristling fences that guard Dimona with stern signs ordering him away, warning also that photography is strictly prohibited.

The Centre is guarded mercilessly. In 1967 an Israeli Mirage fighter strayed into the forbidden air space above this place. An Israeli missile shot it down.

Obsessive secrecy shrouded the project from its very beginning. Construction work started in 1958 on a desert site, eight miles from a tiny settlement of Jewish pioneers called Dimona. Israel pretended she was building a textile factory and the nomadic Bedouin tribes roaming their traditional desert territory did not know any different. But as the Dimona settlement, obliged to accommodate more and more workers, grew to the size of a small town, that pretence became harder to maintain. In 1960 an agent of Egypt’s secret police, the Moukhabarat, reported his suspicions that the spreading industrial complex could scarcely be for the production of synthetic textiles. Egypt passed those suspicions on to the United States.

On 8 December 1960, a United States Air Force photoreconnaissance plane flew over Dimona Centre. It brought back photographs showing railway lines, high tension wires, chimneys, vast concrete workshops and, most important, the telltale soccer ball dome. The next day experts of the American Central Intelligence Agency told a secret and unannounced meeting of the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy that Israel was building a nuclear reactor.

The reaction in Washington bordered on panic. Immediately after the Congressional meeting the US Secretary of State Christian Herter summoned the Israeli ambassador Avraham Harman and confronted him with the evidence of the photographs. Herter demanded to know if Israel was planning to build nuclear weapons. The ambassador said he would consult his government.

It was twelve days before he returned with an assurance that the reactor was intended for purely peaceful purposes. On the same day, Israel’s Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion stood up in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, and said much the same: Dimona would serve only the needs of ‘industry, agriculture, health and science.’

Even in Israel these promises rang hollow. If the reactor were intended solely for the production of energy, why all the secrecy? Why were even members of the Knesset not allowed to visit the site, or examine the budget? And why was Dimona being built by Israel’s Ministry of Defence? (This fact had led to the resignation of all the members of the Israel Atomic Energy Commission, with the exception of the chairman.)

These questions went largely unanswered, and construction work at Dimona went on. The reactor was designed to consume uranium, and there lay the cause of the United States’ concern. In its natural state uranium consists of two isotopes, U-238 and U-235. The second of these is present only in minute quantities, but it is radioactive and provides the vital ingredient for nuclear weapons. Before it can used in this way it has to be separated from the U-238. This is an enormously elaborate and costly process of which only advanced industrial nations are capable.

Dimona, however, gave Israel an alternative. In the course of consuming uranium, reactors like Dimona produce Plutonium-239 as a by-product. Provided that the process is halted at the right point, P-239 can be extracted from the spent fuel with relative ease. It is not such a potent substance as U-235, but, nonetheless, it could be used to make a very effective nuclear bomb. The truth was that even if Dimona were initially intended for ‘peaceful purposes’, it would give Israel the potential to build nuclear weapons.

In the fall of 1967 the Israeli Cabinet met in Jerusalem in an air of crisis. Israel itself was still celebrating her crushing victory in the June Six Day War. But the Cabinet had to confront the fact that, however brilliant in military terms, the victory had served only to increase Israel’s isolation. Israel had justified her ‘pre-emptive strike’ against Syria, Jordan and Egypt on the grounds that France, her main arms supplier, was about to impose an arms embargo. Since the war, France had done precisely that. An enraged General Charles de Gaulle had ordered an immediate halt of arms supplies to Israel and the first casualty had been the fifty Mirage jet fighters which her air force had ordered.

The issue before the Cabinet, however, was not simply how Israel could replace a few aeroplanes. It was rather more basic than that: how to survive. France’s decision was but one further indication, in the shifts and vagaries of international politics, that there was not one country she could rely on.

France was by no means the first ally who had once agreed to supply Israel with arms and then reneged the moment the Arabs found out. Britain, after the Suez fiasco of 1956, had reappraised her Middle East policy on arms supplies, to the benefit of the Arabs, and to Israel’s cost. The United States remained steadfast in her policy of supplying Israel with money but no arms, despite all the protests of the American Jewish lobby. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union was resupplying Israel’s enemies with most of the arms they could want.

This isolation had long been accepted as a fact of life by Israel’s leaders. But what sharpened the debate in the aftermath of the June war was the almost universal hostility shown by Israel’s allies to her conquests, and her decision to occupy large areas of Arab territory.

To some extent Israel could compensate for her lost arms supplies by developing her own arms industries, and this, following the 1967 war, she proceeded to do.*

* In this endeavour she was greatly helped by a Swiss aircraft engineer named Alfred Frauenknecht. He worked for the Swiss aircraft company, Sulzer Brothers, which manufactured the French Mirage III under license for the Swiss Air Force. In return for about $200,000 Frauenknecht stole two tons of Mirage blueprints from Sulzer during 1968 and passed them on to a Mossad agent. Frauenknecht was eventually caught and jailed for four and a half years.

But cabinet ministers such as Moshe Dayan and Shimon Peres contended that the burden of acquiring increasing amounts of conventional weapons would eventually become insupportable. They also pointed out that Israel’s military strategy had always been based on the belief that the Arab countries could afford to lose a war or two, whereas one Israeli defeat would be her last: If Israel continued to rely on conventional weapons, defeat one day would be inevitable. In short, the cabinet must make the monumental decision which it had so far resisted: to acquire nuclear weapons. Israel had of course given herself the option to do so, by building Dimona. Now Dayan, and others, argued that the time had come to convert that option – to dedicate Dimona to the production of the ultimate deterrent.

It was not an argument some members of the Cabinet, such as Prime Minister Golda Meir, and Ygal Allon, could easily embrace. The moral principles on which the state of Israel was founded do not sit comfortably with a plan to build weapons of mass destruction. But in the end, because of the demonstrable fragility of Israel’s international alliances, they accepted the words of Moshe Dayan: Israel had ‘no choice.’

The decision was made, but the practical consequences were considerable. Among the problems a nation with military nuclear aspirations has to solve are those of delivery and detonation. First and foremost, however, came the problem of fuel for the reactor. To produce enough Plutonium-239 for one small bomb* would take Dimona almost a year, and consume approaching twenty tons of uranium.

*Small in a relation term: each warhead would have approximately the same explosive force as the atom bomb which killed 100,000 people in Hiroshima on 6 August 1945.

To build an effective arsenal, consisting of a dozen such weapons, would require 200 tons of uranium.

Israel had nothing like that amount of uranium available. When the reactor was completed in 1964 Israel had been supplied with some uranium by France, who had helped her, in secret, to build Dimona in the first place. By 1967 these stocks were fast running out. There was of course no longer any question of France supplying more. Nor would other countries with uranium, or access to it, risk being called Israel’s accomplice in acquiring the bomb.

All legitimate channels to uranium were closed. Israel could hardly steal it by force without becoming an international outlaw. Only one solution remained: to acquire uranium by stealth. Late in 1967 the Israeli cabinet gave just that assignment to Israel’s central bureau of intelligence and security, Mossad. It was exactly the kind of assignment Mossad relished.

Shortly after the Cabinet’s decision, the Israeli Embassy in London gave a small cocktail party to mark the impending return home of its military attaché, Brigadier General Zwi Zamir. When someone at the party asked Zamir what his plans were, he replied that he was going into the textile business. That was a joke in the best traditions of Mossad. In Israel ‘textiles’ is often a euphemism for secret – hence, Dimona was built under the guise of a textile factory. Zamir was hinting that he was returning to Israel to become the new head of Mossad.

Zamir was a former army commander, who had been given charge of his first brigade at the astonishingly young age of twenty-six. His reputation in action was for checking every detail of a plan before giving it his final approval. His meticulous, circumspect approach was reckoned to be exactly suited to the demands of modern intelligence work, and so, too, was a major aspect of his personality. Zamir was something of an introvert, and he believed that both he, and the agency he was about to take over, should maintain a very low profile. In later years Zamir was to reverse that policy, with disastrous consequences. But at the time of his appointment he was judged by the Israeli cabinet to be the ideal man to take charge of an operation that was more important than any other in Mossad’s short but tumultuous history.

The empire Zamir inherited was without doubt the most battle-hardened secret service in the world. Mossad was formed in 1937, when the Jewish settlers in Palestine were fighting on two fronts. On one they faced the Arabs, with whom they were competing for land. On the other were the British, who had governed Palestine under a mandate from the League of Nations since 1923 and were struggling to restrict immigration in order to maintain a balance between Arabs and Jews.

At the same time Europe’s Jews were at increasing hazard from the obscene race laws of Nazi Germany and the spreading cancer of anti-Semitism. Senior officers of the Haganah, the underground Jewish army, created an agency dedicated to getting Jews out of Europe and into Palestine. They named it Mossad Lealivah Beth: Mossad means Institute; Lealivah Beth, Immigration route B.

Thousand of Jews escaped from the ghettos of Europe along Mossad’s ‘route B’ with forged papers that Mossad provided. The more difficult part of the operation lay in getting those refugees into Palestine. The Royal Navy set up blockades to prevent illegal immigrants coming in by sea, while the British Army patrolled likely landing places. Mossad manned secret radio posts to help small boats in through the blockades, and met the immigrants on the beaches to lead them to safe houses.

The outbreak of World War II brought Mossad a more ambivalent role. Illegal immigration into Palestine continued, but at the same time Mossad agents trained and fought with the British in the fight against Nazi Germany. Some were trained as parachutists and saboteurs at Britain’s Special Operations School near Cairo. They were dropped into occupied eastern Europe to gather intelligence – a mission that was doubly risky for Jews. Later, as the war swung against Hitler, Mossad agents helped foment revolt ahead of the advancing Allied armies. The cost maws heavy: of one sizeable group of agents parachuted into Slovakia, for example, only one man survived.

Germany’s defeat in 1945 allowed Mossad to resume uncomplicated hostilities with the British. Not only immigrants flowed into Palestine along Mossad’s routes but also arms, ammunition, and explosives. Some reached the Jewish terrorist gangs, Irgun and Stern, who harried the British at every turn. Some went to arm the Haganah, increasingly in conflict with the Arabs. Much was stockpiled for the full-scale war with the Arabs which Mossad knew to be inevitable if Israel was to achieve her statehood.

On 14 May 1948, the British, finally weary of trying to keep the two sides apart, pulled out of Palestine. Within hours the Jewish National Council proclaimed the new state of Israel. The Arabs declared war and Egypt, Syria and Jordan attacked simultaneously. As the fighting raged, Mossad was entrusted with the task of supplying arms by every possible means.

Mossad’s efforts enabled Israel to resist the Arab invasion, and after three weeks of fighting the United Nations secured a temporary ceasefire. In the four-week lull that followed, Mossad clinched the deal that won Israel the war. The Israel forces had been greatly handicapped by the bewildering variety of arms they had been supplied with. Unit commanders, never knowing what weapons to expect, stocked a dozen types of ammunition. Above all they feared receiving the totally unreliable Italian war surplus which reached them, via scavenging arms dealers, from the scenes of Italian defeats in Ethiopia and Eritrea. Mossad now helped to negotiate the purchase of a vast consignment of arms, supplied by Czechoslovakia with the blessing of the Soviet Union. The ceasefire collapsed on 9 July and the re-armed Israelis attacked on all fronts. They scored a succession of victories from which the Arab armies never recovered. By January 1949 Israel had won her right to exist.

Mossad’s reward for its part in Israel’s victory was permanent recognition. David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister, disbanded the host of secret – and at times rival – groups which the long struggle had thrown up. *

*There was Haganah, the main Jewish army; Shai, its intelligence wing; Palmach, an elite commando group that had worked closely with Mossad; Rechesch and Bricha, unaffiliated groups of spies and saboteurs; the Stern and Irgun terrorist gangs and Institute X which coordinated their activities with Haganah.

The new state was equipped with a formal civilian security apparatus and Mossad – the Institute – was placed at its pinnacle. The words Lealivah Beth were dropped and it was made responsible for all intelligence gathering and ‘special operations’ abroad. It was given offices in the Ha’Kiryah district of north Tel Aviv. Internal security was the province of another agency, Shin Beth, but there was no doubt which was the senior service. Mossad’s director, Isser Harel, became chief executive of both, and reported directly to the Prime Minister.

Harel was a veteran of the long Jewish struggle. Born in Russia in 1912, he had emigrated to Palestine at the age of seventeen to work on a kibbutz and was almost immediately recruited into the Jewish resistance. By the time he was appointed head of Mossad he had spent more than half his life in a twilight world of subterfuge, sabotage, and guerrilla action.

Harel’s Mossad was. Like the man, tough and uncompromising. At first it was preoccupied with revenge, hunting down Nazi war criminals. Its most celebrated victim was Adolf Eichmann, the SS officer who had administered Hitler’s final solution. He was traced by Mossad to Argentina, kidnapped and taken back to Israel for trial and execution. That kidnapping was justified in Israel by the enormity of Eichmann’s crime, but the government recognized that Mossad could not go on invading friendly countries and openly breaking their laws. In the early 1960’s at Prime Minister Ben-Gurion’s insistence, Mossad evolved into a more orthodox secret service, concentrating on intelligence gathering and analysis. This more restrained policy did not altogether suit Isser Harel and in 1963, after a furious dispute with Ben-Gurion, which we will come to, he resigned.

His replacement as head of Mossad was Meir Amit. He had the same background of active service in Israel’s cause, but he agreed with Ben-Gurion that Mossad should renounce direct action in favour of a more modern approach based on subterfuge and stealth. Born in Palestine, Amit had been raised on a kibbutz and then recruited into the Haganah. He fought with distinction, and was wounded, during the 1948 war, and was then given a brigade to command. Later he was transferred to Military Intelligence. He went to Washington in the late 1950’s to cement the already excellent relations between Israeli Military Intelligence and the CIA. On his return to Tel Aviv in 1961, he was appointed head of Agaf Modiin – usually shortened to Aman – the espionage section of military intelligence. It was there that he learned to appreciate the immense value to the spy business of computer technology.

In the late 1950’s, a brilliant Israeli scientist named Yuval Ne’eman had been assigned to Aman. Professor Ne’eman recommended that Aman should gather every single scrap of information about Israel’s military enemies and feed it into computers. Even the most banal items produced from interrogating captured soldiers and security suspects, down to their sock size and the brand of tea they drank, were collated remorselessly. In that way, Ne’eman predicted, a picture of the intentions of Israel’s enemies would emerge.

When he arrived at Mossad, Amit was thoroughly convinced of the value of computerized information. He borrowed the Ne’eman technique and Mossad’s own files were in turn computerized. At the same time Amit equipped Mossad with the best technological gadgetry of modern espionage, such as electronic listening devices that can overhear a conversation half a mile away.

Amit found that Mossad’s embattled past also had several techniques to offer. In the desperate scramble for weapons during the 1948 war, for example, Mossad had experimented with the use of sympathetic foreigners and front companies. Thus, in Britain, a Mossad agent had come across four Bristol Beaufighters, long-range night-fighters that had flown during World War Two but had since been put up for sale as scrap. British regulations forbade the planes to take off and, anyway, rationing made petrol nearly impossible to obtain. Then a British company named Alpha-Film obtained permission to fly Beaufighters for a movie scene. As empty cameras turned the four planes took off, headed east, and disappeared. Two days later they were in action against Egypt.

In the USA, Mossad pulled off an even more remarkable coup. An arm dealer was persuaded to put with four B-17 Flying Fortresses in the belief that they were to fly for a new airline in Central America. They, too, took off and headed for Israel, one of them making an immediate contribution to the war effort by bombing King Farouk’s Palace in Egypt on the way home.

These were techniques, Amit realized, which could profitably be updated to match the circumstances of the 1960’s. Mossad set about recruiting friends and allies who would be able to help Israel in times of need. The hour of the square-jawed, trench-coated secret agent was past. Mossad’s helpers might be drawn from the ranks of respectable businessmen with the excuse to travel and easy access to government bodies and international corporations. They could be lawyers and accountants experienced in the game of setting up companies in such improbable business centres as Liberia and Panama. They could be fast moving entrepreneurs who could offer a range of unlikely contacts, accommodation addresses and safe houses. Or they could be hucksters living on the edge of the law who would launder money to finance overseas escapades.

Amit stayed with Mossad until the 1967 war was most satisfactory concluded, and then left to run a Tel Aviv metal firm. (The move to a high position in business is a customary route for senior officials who have served Israel well.) The Institute inherited by Zwi Zamir had been thoroughly modernised. Given that many of its top men had been with Mossad since the beginning, it was inevitable that its operations were still marked with a certain panache. But it no longer relied for success solely on its flair for brilliant improvisation. It had all the techniques of modern espionage at its disposal. The best Mossad schemes were those for which the groundwork had long been laid.

When in 1967 Mossad received its most vital assignment, the objectives were clearly stated:

• to acquire by stealth 200 tons of uranium, which was the minimum amount Israel needed to build an effective nuclear deterrent;
• to leave behind no shred of evidence that could prove Israel was the culprit.

Mossad decided to meet Dimona’s needs from Belgium where a commercial supplier had the largest privately-owned stockpile of uranium in the world. That supplier was actively seeking buyers. And there was the added attraction that Belgium was a member of the European Economic Community, whose nuclear safeguards were less than rigorous. Even so, buying the uranium, getting it out of Europe, and getting it 4,000 miles home would require all Mossad’s flair and audacity.

The plan Mossad arrived at had five major elements. The Institute had to:

• recruit a ‘friend’ who had sufficient cover to be able to buy uranium openly;
• find an excuse to get the uranium on to the high seas;
• provide the means to do so – a ship and a crew;
• give the ship a legitimate reason to take the uranium all the way from Belgium to the Mediterranean without raising the alarm;
• arrange the transfer of the uranium at sea for the last stage of the journey to Israel.

Finally there was the matter of a codename. Mossad likes to give its operations cryptic, sometimes unfathomable titles. When it set out to provide Dimona with enough nuclear fuel to last a decade, the operation was codenamed Plumbat. No modern dictionary contains such a word. I might have been intended as a cleaver play on words: the aim of the operation was to derive uranium; the derivative of uranium is lead; and the medieval Latin word for lead was plumba. On the other hand, perhaps Mossad was enjoying an obscure joke. In historical English the words ‘plumb’ and ‘bat’ were both slang expressions for deception – and deception was certainly the foundation of Mossad’s scheme. Or PLUMBAT may simply have been chosen as a likely sounding trade name for barrels of chemicals, which is how the uranium was to be disguised on its journey home.

Chapter 3

A Small Town in Germany