Chapter 6

It’s Okay By Euratom

Sailors say that a new ship, like a new woman, takes a bit of getting used to, and it is customary when a ship changes hands for the fresh crew to learn about her quirks and foibles from the men they are replacing. For this reason Captain Ludwig Hausen, master of the Scheersberg, stayed with the ship in Rotterdam after her dry-dock to await the arrival of the new owner’s captain. So, too, did the Scheersberg’s chief engineer, Rudolf Kreuzfeldt, who had considerable experience of the ship’s engine to pass on. They need not have bothered. On 28 September the day after Yarisal bought the Scheersberg, Hansen received orders to abandon ship. He paid off Kreuzfeldt, along with the cook and steward who had also remained on board, and returned to his home in Lubeck, northeast of Hamburg. Hansen felt uneasy at leaving the ship unattended and more than a little puzzled by what had happened.

Hansen would not be the only one who failed to understand what Yarisal was up to in the last months of 1968, for the Scheersberg was to be involved in a number of odd events as Operation Plumbat neared its climax. But the explanation for what happened to Hansen, at least, is probably quite simple: his replacement as captain was not yet ready to come aboard. Yarisal had been preoccupied with other changes. One appears academic; the other, less so.

First, Yarisal gave the ship a new name, in the most economic fashion, by the addition of a single letter: the Scheersberg became the Scheersberg A (Yarisal was fond of this device: His ship Flower Bay was previously named Flower boy.) Second, he applied to remove the ship from the West Germany register and place her under Liberia’s more convenient flag. This switch in registration brought Yarisal immediate benefits. Unlike west Germany, Liberia did not impose regulations about the make-up and number of ship’s crew. Under her new flag the Scheersberg A could sail with as few hands as Yarisal cared to employ.

On 29 September, the day after Captain Hansen went home, a scratch crew of Spaniards, Portuguese and Moroccans was recruited in Rotterdam. They were joined soon afterwards by two officers who had previously served on Yarisal’s ships the Linora and the Almaflora. On 2 October, still without benefit of either a captain or a chief engineer, the Scheersberg A left Rotterdam for a one-day voyage along the north Dutch coast to the West German port of Emden.

It was only then that Yarisal set about making up the ship’s complement. One man Yarisal wanted aboard was Peter Koerner, a German ship’s engineer who had sailed for Yarisal on both the Linora and the Almaflora. Koerner had met Yarisal a couple of times, and once even dined with him. He shared the judgement of those who held Yarisal to be a gentleman. He admired his courtesy and his restrained good manners, and rather hoped that Yarisal thought the same of him.

Koerner was at home in Hamburg when Yarisal telephoned him. Yarisal told Koerner he had acquired a new ship, and joked about the ‘lucky coincidence’ that, like the previous vessels Koerner had served on, the name of this ship also ended in the letter A. Yarisal asked Koerner to become her chief engineer. Koerner accepted and agreed to take the train to Emden as soon as possible.

Koerner arrived at the port on 7 October. The Scheersberg A, he found, was not the most elegant of ships. She was one of the sea’s workhorses, built strictly to purpose. Her twin holds occupied almost three-quarters of her length, with derricks on the bow and amidships and a gantry crane in front of the ship’s rather cramped bridge. The crew’s quarters, he discovered, were not exactly spacious, either.

Koerner’s opinion of the Scheersberg A fell a little further when he made a closer inspection of the ship. Her paint work had been neglected and both her decks and hull were scarred with rust. Of particular concern to Koerner, however, was what he found when he clambered down the narrow stairway to the engine room. The engine appeared to have been deprived of regular maintenance.

Koerner would have liked to strip the engine immediately, but there was no time. The Scheersberg A had a bulk cargo to carry from Emden to Naples in Southern Italy and she was due to sail just as her new captain turned up.

The captain arrived shortly after Koerner. He said that he was a Welshman, from Cardiff. He was young for a skipper, perhaps thirty-five, but he was very assured, very professional. He had a predilection for dark blue shirts and dark blue trousers, like a navy man. He said his name was Peter Barrow.

The Scheersberg A began her passage south to Naples on 9 October. The crew spent the voyage, and the rest of October, cleaning her up, while Koerner overhauled the engine as best he could. Barrow stalked the ship relentlessly, learning everything about her there was to know.

The crew did not know it, of course, but the long trek south from northern Europe, down the Iberian peninsula, through the Strait of Gibraltar, and into the Mediterranean was a rehearsal for a voyage to come. And while Barrow was familiarizing himself with the Scheersberg A, other players in the drama were securing her future cargo.

Back in the Brussels office of SGM, Denis Dewez fulfilled the promise he had made to Herbert Schulzen in Wiesbaden. He drew up a formal contract for the uranium deal. It stipulated that SGM would supply Asmara Chemie with 200 tons of uranium oxide for a price of 190 million Belgian francs – about £1.5 million. Herbert Schulzen signed the contract on behalf of Asmara on 10 October. Dewez then set about the business of winning approval for the deal from Euratom, the Common Market’s nuclear watchdog. It was not a difficult task.

Euratom was divided into two halves. There was a supply division, based in Brussels, which had the job of acquiring uranium supplies for countries which belonged to the EEC, and there was a safeguards division, then in the process of moving from Belgium to Luxembourg, which was supposed to monitor movements of uranium and spot any diversions.

Together they were charged with controlling the use of nuclear materials in Europe, but they laboured under appalling limitations.

Euratom was formed at the same time as the EEC in 1957 in the hope that it would contribute to the political unification of Europe. That hope was soon dispelled. Euratom could only work if the member countries surrendered some of their sovereignty for the greater good of the whole. They were not prepared to do so.

Squabbles continually erupted among the six members about what role Euratom ought to play. It was above all France, the EEC’s leading nuclear nation, who did her best to wreck Euratom, treating it with ill-concealed contempt. In 1982 France managed to install Pierre Chatenet as Euratom’s president. Chatenet announced that Euratom should limit itself to collecting and centralizing information. In 1963 France submitted a memorandum complaining that Euratom was spendthrift and overambitious, and voted against the next Euratom budget. Any controls Euratom tried to enforce unfailingly violated somebody’s national rights and were accordingly ignored. In December 1967 Euratom, torn by constant dissent, almost ceased to exist. The six members failed to agree on its next five-year plan and only after vigorous efforts by West Germany did they vote to continue Euratom’s budget, and thus the agency itself, on a year-to-year basis. By 1968 Euratom was a cripple.

One curious result of the dissension inside Euratom was that the safeguards people had no say over deals such as the one that SGM and Asmara had in mind. What responsibility there was for vetting such transactions lay with the supply division, and in particular with Felix Oboussier, a personable German who was not by training a nuclear expert, but a lawyer.

Having secured Schulzen’s signature on the uranium contract, Dewez paid Oboussier an informal visit. Even for a company the size of SGM, a £1.5 million sale was significant, and Dewez took to Oboussier’s office some support in the person of Jean Mikolajcak, titular head of the uranium division. Mikolajcak carried with him the prestige of being the son of SGM’s founder.

Dewez and Mikolajcak gave Oboussier a rough outline of what Asmara had said was going to happen to the 200 tons of uranium: it would be shipped from the Belgian port of Antwerp to Genoa, Italy, and then be taken to SAICA’s plant near Milan, after treatment it would be shipped back to northern Europe to the Dutch port of Rotterdam, and then transported by road or rail to Asmara in Wiesbaden; there it would be used for what is known in the jargon as non-nuclear purposes – namely, as chemical catalyst. Oboussier could see nothing objectionable in the scheme even though the uranium would technically leave Euratom’s jurisdiction for the length of the voyages to and from Italy. To be on the safe side, however, he said that he would like to have a letter from Asmara, confirming the details.

Dewez and Mikolajcak agrees to pass on the message to Asmara. Just before they left, they mentioned to Oboussier that the Asmara deal was of course extremely confidential. Oboussier was used to that. Everybody who came to see him about uranium deals wanted the details kept secret; it was that kind of business.

A few days later, on 17 October, Schulzen wrote to Euratom on Asmara’s behalf confirming the account Dewez had given. On reflection, one part of the tale did trouble Oboussier a little, and that was Asmara’s claim that it was going to use the uranium as a catalyst. That was a practice Oboussier had never heard of. Prudently he decided to check its feasibility with some of the more technically minded members of Euratom’s staff. The reply was reassuring. As it happened, a month earlier the Dutch government had bought some uranium for the very same purpose. That lucky coincidence dispelled any remaining doubts. Nobody in Euratom saw any need to make inquiries into Asmara’s background, or, indeed, into any other aspect of the deal.

On 23 October SGM sent a hand-delivered letter formally applying for Euratom’s sanction. Under its own regulations Euratom had eight days in which to raise objections. It did not. By Euratom’s silence, on 30 October the sale of the uranium and its shipment by sea from Antwerp received automatic official approval.

On that date, the Scheersberg A was heading north from Casablanca towards the small port of La Pallice on the west coast of France. On 6 November she left La Pallice and, her pilot run to Naples and back nearly completed, headed north once again, bound for Rotterdam and Antwerp.

Mossad’s luck had held so far. Israel all but had her uranium. What remained was to get it home.

Israel’s uranium was waiting to be collected from the storage silo at the giant metal refinery close to the village of Olen. It was in the form of uranium oxide, known as yellowcake, which has the colour of an egg yolk and the texture of coarse sand. Moving 200 tons of the stuff the 4,000 miles from Belgium to Israel obviously presented considerable logistical problems. Nowhere were there more complications than over the first leg of that journey, the twenty-five miles between Olen and the port of Antwerp. That part of the trip would be overland, and transporting the uranium would need special care, given its terrifying propensities.

Uranium oxide was discovered in 1789 by the German physicist Martin Klaproth who named it in honour of the planet Uranus, discovered just eight years earlier. For a long time uranium was studied as a mere scientific curiosity since no practical value for it could be found. It was through his experiments on uranium ore that the French physicist Henri Becquerel discovered radioactivity in 1896. Not long afterwards the French husband and wife team Pierre and Marie Curie discovered that the most radioactive element in uranium ore was radium. They did not realize just how deadly it was, but were saved from serious ill effect at the time by the winds blowing through the drafty attic their poverty forced them to use as a laboratory. They later died of radiation sickness. So, too, did the watch girls of New jersey, employed in the 1920’s to paint radium on watch faces to make them luminous. They licked their paint brushes and absorbed radium into their bodies. Their doctors, who did not know of this new occupational disease, said they must have died from angina or syphilis.

Uranium was soon to become the most controversial of all the elements. In 1938 two German physicists discovered that when bombarded with neutron particles the uranium atom could splits. They realized that if a succession of atoms could be split in a chain reaction, staggering amounts of energy would be produced. One pound of uranium, it was later shown, could yield as much energy as three million pounds of coal. The first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction was conducted by Enrico Fermi at the University of Chicago on 2 December 1942. The success of that experiment led inevitably to the atomic bomb. The first was detonated on 16 July 1945 at a test site at Alamogordo Air Base in the New Mexico desert. Three weeks later the United States Air Force dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. One hundred and forty thousand people died.

Yellowcake in its raw form, however, is relatively harmless. But it is still radioactive, and dangerous to swallow of inhale. As one British atomic energy official said: ‘You wouldn’t want to put your bed on it.’ Not surprisingly then, governments and local authorities have imposed considerable restrictions on the manner of its transportation. The journey from Olen to Antwerp was not going to be simple. Fortunately for Mossad some very accomplished help was available, and it was now unwittingly recruited.

As Belgium’s biggest port, Antwerp was equipped with several major freight companies. Any one of them could cope with the technical difficulties of shifting 300 tons of radioactive material the short distance to Antwerp. But it would not be easy to hire one of these companies. Because of the occupational hazard of becoming involved in hauling illicit cargo, they were so fussy it was necessary to approach one of them by a circuitous route.

Towards the end of October Asmara hired a Frankfurt broker named Klaus Rehwagen who had considerable contacts in the freight business. Rehwagen in turn approached the Belgian transport firm of Ziegler & Company, with whom he had done business in the past. Ziegler happily accepted the assignment because it knew and trusted Rehwagen. Ziegler made only one check on Asmara itself, into its credit rating. The First National City Bank in Amsterdam reported it was satisfactory.

Once hired, Ziegler provided a very comprehensive service. The job was assigned to Ziegler’s Antwerp manager, Marcel Heynen, and he enthusiastically found out about all the formalities involved in moving the uranium. He obtained the necessary permissions from the Belgian Ministry of Transport and the Belgian police. He hired a 5train to carry the goods from Olen to Antwerp. He hired a berth in Antwerp dock where the ship could be loaded. He hired stevedores and cranes to do the work. And he hired river pilots and dock pilots to get the boat in and out of the harbour. Asmara, and the men behind it, did not have to expose themselves to any further official scrutiny.

During this feverish period Heynen frequently telephoned Schulzen to let him know how things were going. At the end of the first week of November Heynen called him again to say that Ziegler was ready to move. He asked Schulzen for the name of the ship that would carry the uranium to Genoa, and for final confirmation of the date when she would be in Antwerp. The date was 16 November. Schulzen said that the name of the ship was the Scheersberg A.

In view of all the hard work they had put in to cleaning her up, it was with some dismay that the crew of the Scheersberg A learned early in November that they were to be discharged. Captain Barrow broke the news as the little ship headed north back to Rotterdam, barely a month since she had left Emden for Naples. He said that Yarisal had sold the ship and that the new owners would be supplying their own crew.

The Scheersberg A arrived in Rotterdam on 11 November. Peter Koerner, like his predecessor, expected that he would pass on his knowledge of the engine to the replacement chief engineer. Like his predecessor he was disillusioned. Barrow said his orders were that the entire crew, himself included, should be paid off immediately. They gathered their belongings and departed the same day, leaving the ship unattended.

Four days later, on 15 November, the Scheersberg A left Rotterdam, bound for Antwerp. Her new crew was unremarkable except it was half the normal strength and the seven deck hands were all Caucasian. The captain was an assured, professional young skipper with a predilection for dark blue shirts and trousers, just like a navy man. He said his name was Peter Borrow.

Chapter 7

Operation Plumbat