Chapter 19

Closing the Stable Door

Nearly a decade passed after Mossad’s Operation Plumbat before even the fact that 200 tons of uranium had disappeared became public. The European authorities deliberately covered up ‘the loss’ for as long as they could because they found the whole episode acutely embarrassing.

To begin with it had been quite a while before Euratom, the European Economic Community’s nuclear watchdog, itself suspected that the Plumbat uranium had gone astray. It was seven months before it knew for sure. Even then it had no clear idea, and certainly no proof, as to where the stuff had gone.

The first hint that something was wrong came two months after the Scheersberg A had left Antwerp on that cold November morning in 1968. Under Euratom’s regulations SAICA, the Italian paint company, had until 15 January 1969 to report that it had received the uranium. But no word came from Milan. There could have been held up in Italian customs or SAICA did not understand the reporting procedure. On 21 January Euratom wrote to SAICA politely reminding the company of its obligations. A copy of the relevant regulation was enclosed. Euratom also wrote to Asmara Chemie in Wiesbaden reminding the German company that it, too, had an obligation to file a report when it received the uranium. Neither letter elicited a reply.

Another two months passed before the watchdog stirred again. There was still no word from SAICA. The matter was brought to the attention of the director of Euratom’s Safeguards Division. He was new to the job, and, as it happened, Jacchia was not alarmed by SAICA’s silence. He put it down to the inefficiency of the Italian postal service which, he said, would still be struggling to clear the backlog of mail caused by the Christmas holidays. The Plumbat file was returned to the pending tray.

It was reviewed again in mid-April. The continuing lack of a report from SAICA was readily understandable since Italian postal workers were now on strike. Less easy to explain was the absence of any word from Asmara. It should have received the uranium from SAICA – in catalyst form – some time between January and march and it should have reported that fact to Euratom by 15 April. Professor Jacchia decided that the time had come to shake the tree.

In view of the postal strike in Italy, it was necessary for Euratom to make contact with SAICA by telephone. The call to Milan was not rewarding. On the question of whether it had treated the uranium and dispatched it to Germany, SAICA was, as Euratom later said, ‘very vague.’ It was also ‘very vague’ as to where the uranium might now be. Indeed, by the end of the call, it was not even clear if SAICA had ever received the goods. Hoping for elucidation, Euratom telephoned Asmara. Again, straightforward questions got ‘very vague’ answers.

Firm action was obviously called for. In the middle of May, with the Italian postal strike over, Euratom sent brusque letters to SAICA and Asmara, insisting on some information. SAICA did not reply. Asmara did – five weeks later. Its letter, dated 29 June, was very disquieting.

Asmara professed itself to be puzzled by Euratom’s persistent inquiries. The company had purchased the uranium ‘on the instructions of a client.’ The client had said it wanted the uranium shipped to SAICA but had then ‘decided differently.’ From that point on the client had made its own arrangements. Asmara had ceased to be involved.

Euratom’s immediate reply was brief and to the point: Who was Asmara’s client?

The answer, when it came, was from an eminent law firm in the West german capital, Bonn, which announced that it had been retained by Asmara. The law firm pointed out that Euratom’s charter did not allow – indeed, expressly forbade – any invasion by the agency of ‘commercial confidentiality’. The identity of Asmara’s client was, in the law firm’s opinion, a ‘commercial confidence’: it was none of Euratom’s business.

Professor Enrico Jacchia and his men in the Safeguards Division were not well-equipped to take on a recalcitrant company and its smart lawyers. The only weapon they had was Euratom’s power to demand the return of the uranium. Since Asmara did not have it, and declined to say who did, Jacchia’s men were impotent. They did not even have the authority to conduct an investigation. In forming a nuclear policy for the EEC, the member states had decided against giving Euratom any vestige of police powers. The controversial question of enforcing the policy was therefore left to the security forces of each individual country.

In these circumstances Euratom could only continue to make polite inquiries while the official investigation was put into more powerful hands. In July 1969 the EEC’s political executive, the European Commission, informed the six member countries of ‘the loss’ and asked Belgium, West Germany and Italy to institute separate inquiries. They were conducted with varying degrees of enthusiasm.

The security agencies of Belgium and Italy confined themselves exclusively to selfish questions. Their concern was whether the uranium had fallen into subversive hands within their own boundaries. Having respectively assured themselves that the Plumbat material had left Antwerp and not arrived in Genoa, they dropped the case. The Belgians did not even bother to interview Marcel Heynen and Josef Verhulst of the Belgian transport company Ziegler who shared the distinction of having met the crew of the Scheersberg A.

The West Germans, as we have seen, were more energetic. In addition to finding and boarding the Scheersberg A, BKA agents spent some time inquiring into the background of Asmara and the two Herberts, Schulzen and Scharf. But the BKA had no power to elicit the name of Asmara’s client, and it did not find any evidence that the uranium was in Germany. Neither did it suspect that anyone involved in the Plumbat affair had broken German law. In these happy circumstances, the BKA did not care where the uranium had gone.

Euratom still cared. But Professor Jacchia did not even dare ask the official investigators what they had discovered: they would, he says, have accused him of playing at James bond. All he could do was continue sniffing nervously around the edges of the Plumbat affair in the hope of finding a clue or two. For the role of bloodhound he had chosen one of his staff, a Frenchman named Pierre Bommelle.

Euratom still cared.

With no more authority than a private citizen – and a foreign one at that – Brommelle went to West Germany to visit Asmara. At the beginning of 1969 the company had moved ten miles or so from Wiesbaden to a wooden shack on the side of a country road – very convenient for Herbert Schulzen since it was only two miles from his home at Hettenhain. Bommelle took along his Geiger counter, just in case.

Schulzen was courteous but unrepentant. He still refused to reveal the name of Asmara’s client and claimed to have no idea where the uranium might be. Bommelle, Geiger counter at the ready, asked if he might take a look inside Asmara’s shack. Certainly, said Schulzen. It was totally empty.

The visit was, however, not an entire waste of time. While Bommelle was at the shack a truck arrived to deliver a special consignment to Asmara – uranium. It was only 212 kilograms and Asmara had not needed Euratom’s approval to buy such a tiny amount. Nevertheless, Bommelle made something of a scene: this was insult added to injury. The next day, thinking better of it, Asmara returned the uranium to its West German supplier.

Euratom’s last hope of cracking the mystery lay with Francesco Sertorio, the head of SAICA. The Italian company had never bothered to send replies to Euratom’s pleas for information, or, if it had, the Italian post office had lost them. In November 1969, a year after the uranium had left Antwerp, Bommelle went to Milan, still carrying his Geiger counter. It was redundant. SAICA’s modest offices clearly could not have accommodated anything like 200 tons of uranium. The offices did, however, contain files and Bommelle asked if he might look through them since Sertorio seemed to have difficulty in remembering anything at all about the Plumbat business. Sertorio affably agreed: he was quite unconcerned and did not even look at the Euratom identification which Bommelle dutifully offered.

The files revealed one very relevant letter. It had been written by Schulzen on behalf of Asmara and it was dated 2 December 1968 – Bommelle did not know it, but that same day the uranium had been transferred at sea from the Scheersberg A. The letter said that Asmara was regretfully obliged to cancel its contract with SAICA, and the uranium would not now coming to Italy for treatment.

Bommelle’s amazing discovery refreshed Sertorio’s memory. Now he remembered, he said, that he had made a deal nwith Asmara. On cancellation of the contract they had paid very reasonable compensation of £8,500. He had no idea what could have happened to the uranium. He said he hoped it had not fallen into the wrong hands.

Bommelle returned to Brussels, and Euratom admitted defeat. Jacchia, Bommelle’s boss, could only wonder at what he called the ‘architectural beauty’ of the scheme. The European Commission, representing the six member countries, went into secret session and decided to close the Plumbat file. It also decided to cover up the whole messy affair. The European Parliament, made up of representatives from member countries, and the body to which the Commission is supposed to be responsible, was not informed of ‘the loss’. As one Commission official later said: ‘It would have made our security regulations look a little ridiculous.’

The Norwegian could, of course, have blown the Plumbat affair wide open at the Lillehammer murder trial. Instead, the cover-up remained largely intact until the summer of 1976 when an intoxicating rumour began circulating on Washington’s Capitol Hill. Paul Leventhal, then legal counsel to the US Senate’s Government Operations Committee, was one of those who heard gossip that Israel had somehow acquired the means to make nuclear weapons. The rumour mill had precious little information to grind: only that Israel had obtained a large amount of uranium, probably from Europe. How and when remained a mystery which Leventhal became determined to resolve.

Leventhal was passionately concerned about the hazards of nuclear proliferation. At the end of 1976 he left his government job and, with the aid of a grant from the Ford Foundation, set up an office on Massachusetts Avenue in Washington to research and write a book about the inadequacy of nuclear safeguards. Israel’s acquisition of uranium would provide powerful support for Leventhal’s thesis and he pursued the rumour with vigour. It was not until March 1977, however, that he stumbled across some solid information, through a chance meeting with the Euratom official Felix Oboussier.

Since Oboussier had approved the contract between SGM and Asmara, he naturally knew a good deal about the Plumbat affair. He also knew that the EEC Commission had decided to suppress the episode. Being a frank man, however, Oboussier, who met Leventhal during a business trip to the United States, saw no reason not to chat informally about what he regarded as a fragment of nuclear history. He never dreamed that Leventhal would make public use of the information. But then he underestimated Leventhal’s genuine concern about nuclear proliferation and his determination to broadcast and exploit the lessons of Plumbat.

Leventhal chose to break the story in a highly public manner. He repeated some of what Oboussier had told him in a speech to an anti-nuclear conference held in Salzburg, Austria, in late April 1977. To assure its impact, he leaked the story in advance to The Los Angeles Times.

Leventhal’s revelation lacked detail. For instance, he did not give the date of the operation or the ship’s name, the Scheersberg A. And some of his information was wrong. He said that after the heist the ship had reappeared with ‘a new name and a new registry,’ neither of which was true. News reporters alerted by the LA Times story were eager for more – anything, really – but Leventhal could not add much except the speculation that ‘the material was unloaded in Israel.’

Perhaps to make up for the lack of detail Leventhal retailed to some journalist a bizarre theory that the mastermind behind the Plumbat Affair could have been a French arms dealer and prince, Michel de Bourbon-Parma. Leventhal said he had not had time to check out this lead but was willing to allow journalists to do so providing he was paid if the story turned out to be true. It was not. In Paris, Antony Terry, European editor of The Sunday Times, interviewed Prince Michel who denied the allegation. He said that in 1968 he was busy selling American outboard engines to Egypt for French companies. He added that he would not touch uranium because ‘it stinks.’ He could only guess that he was being confused with one Michel Ipanema de Moreira de Bourbon, another arms dealer and a pretender to his title, who also lived in Paris. When Terry spoke to this Bourbon he would say only that the other Prince Michel was the culprit: ‘I have the proof but I cannot reveal it.’ Terry left the prince and the pretender to continue their private feud.

Nonetheless, Leventhal’s basic revelation at Salzburg was sufficiently explosive to send the staff of the EEC Commission into shock. Besieged by journalists, the bureaucrats in Brussels would say nothing. Mercifully, the weekend intervened to relieve the pressure, but on the following Monday, 2 May, the siege resumed. The Commission was forced to publicly confess its nine-year-old secret.

Even so, the Commission admitted only that 200 tons of uranium had been ‘lost’ on the high seas somewhere between Antwerp and Genoa in November 1968. When, three days later, at the EEC’s weekly press conference, the Commission’s spokesman was bombarded with questions, he revealed little more that the identity of the uranium’s purchaser, Asmara Chemie.

If the Commission hoped that would be the end of the matter, it reckoned without the aspirations of Enrico Jacchia. He had left his job as Euratom’s safeguards director in 1973 after opting for early retirement and a fat pension. Having been in charge of Euratom’s informal investigation into the disappearance of the uranium, he reckoned he had a fact or two to offer. The day after the EEC’s press conference Jacchia called one of his own in Rome. As he later described it, in the synopsis of his forthcoming book: ‘In a conference of the foreign press, 200 journalists and representatives of television from seven countries, I revealed the operational design of the Plumbat Affair.’

That was overstating the case, but Jacchia did provide more information than the Commission had done. In the process he did little to endear himself to his former EEC colleagues, some of whom had not been very fond of him when they worked together. (Neither did they take kindly to the newspaper articles which Jacchia was subsequently commissioned to write, drawing the lessons of Plumbat. As one former Euratom man put it: ‘I suppose he’s going to tell us how he solved it.’)

By now the European Parliament, to which the Commission is supposed to be responsible, was in a state of high dudgeon. Many members believed that the Parliament should have been told about ‘the loss.’ Guido Brunner, the EEC Commissioner for Energy, was summoned to the next session to explain why it was not.

When he appeared before Parliament, Brunner, a West German, was labouring under the handicap that he had not been Energy Commissioner during the affair and so had no firsthand knowledge of the events. That did not inhibit him from defending the Commission and Euratom. It did, however, lead to some rather curious statements. He studiously ignored the fact that most of those in the know had believed for years that the uranium had gone to Israel, where it was perfectly suited for use in Dimona’s reactor. Brunner said that the Plumbat uranium ‘cannot be used as easily as some people think to manufacture bombs.’ Indeed, warming to his theme, he added that it was impossible to use the Plumbat uranium for military purposes. Smartly switching tack, he explained that Euratom’s regulations had since been tightened to prevent any more of this perfectly harmless uranium from going astray. Commissioner Brunner gave the impression that the whole business had been very unimportant and that Euratom should actually be congratulated for even discovering that the heist had taken place. He was, as one member of Parliament later remarked, like a bank president claiming a reward for the discovery that his bank had been robbed.

Brunner’s performance raised more questions than it answered, and, two days later, another EEC Commissioner stepped up to the rostrum in an attempt to sort out the mess. Wilhelm Haferkamp, also a West German, had been Commissioner for Energy in 1968 and 1969, and was therefore directly involved in the Plumbat Affair. His more intimate knowledge, however, did not make him any more enlightening – or reassuring.

At a press conference in Brussels he blandly announced that little could be done to counter any organized plot to divert nuclear materials from the EEC. He apparently though little of the new regulations which, he said, he had personally proposed in 1970: they had not been adopted until 1976, Haferkamp said, and then only in ‘a toned down form.’

The reporters at the press conference were curious to know, if, at the time of Plumbat, Euratom had possessed any watchdog powers at all. Certainly, Haferkamp said, it could have withdrawn uranium from any company which carried out irregular practices. Unfortunately, Euratom had been unable to withdraw from Asmara what it had been unable to find. Well then, asked the reporters, what about sanctions against the owners of the Scheersberg A? That, too, had been impossible, Haferkamp regretted. He said that after leaving Antwerp, the ship had disappeared, had been sold en route and was eventually found outside EEC waters.

That was, of course, sheer nonsense. The Scheersberg A changed hands long before it left Antwerp on its momentous voyage. As for ‘disappearing,’ after leaving Antwerp and making its rendezvous the ship did little else but ply its trade within EEC waters for almost the whole of 1969. Euratom could have found that out from Lloyd’s of London for the price of a phone call.

Many members of the European parliament were bitterly frustrated by their failure to obtain any serious answers from the Commission on what they regarded as a profoundly disturbing episode. Some, including British member Tam Dalyell, came to the conclusion that perfidy on the part of one or more EEC member governments lay behind the Commission’s determination to continue the cover-up.

The most popular theory both in and out of Parliament was that West German government had actively colluded in Israel’s plot to acquire uranium from Dimona. In the United States, for example, Time magazine claimed that the then German Chancellor Kurt-Georg Kiesinger had assured the Israelis ‘they would be allowed to disguise their purchase [of uranium] as a private transaction in West Germany.’ The West German newsmagazine Der Spiegel agreed that the coup was probably stage-managed by the Germans and Israelis although it threw in the extra dimension of ‘American connivance’.

In November 1977 Rolling Stone magazine said that West Germany had conspired in the plot in return for Israel’s expertise in uranium enrichment techniques – and $3.7 million in cash. Rolling Stone also claimed that Israel disguised West German involvement by sending commandos to stage a fake hijack of the Scheersberg A ‘as it idled on the calm seas of the Mediterranean.’

A hijack – this time a real one – was also the theory advanced by a paperback book, Operation Uranium Ship, published in the US in February 1978. However, the authors of this account claimed that the plot was originally hatched by Morocco, acting secretly for India. Brave, square-jawed Israeli commandos, supposedly hijacked the Scheersberg A in mid-voyage – having, of course, disposed of Egyptian secret agents along the way.

The truth is more banal. As we have shown, the uranium was there for taking. Because of the weakness of Euratom’s safeguards Israel had no need to stage a romantic hijack or ask for help from other governments. The conspiracy theory which accuses West Germany is also damaged by the fact that it was German federal agents who, on government orders, conducted the only vigorous investigation into the Plumbat affair.

There is, moreover, no doubt that the West German government was acutely embarrassed by the involvement of Asmara Chemie, a German company and a defence contractor at that. Very conscious of Germany’s dependence on Arab oil, the Bonn government naturally wanted the whole messy business to go away as quickly as possible. When German socialist representatives attempted to raise the matter in the Reichstag they were told that the episode was like ‘the snows of yesteryear,’ [From the line, ‘mais ou sont les neiges d’antan’ by the fifteenth century French poet Francois Villon] and should be forgotten. When one of the socialists, Gerhard Flamig, telephoned Chancellor Helmut Schmidt’s office to press for information he aroused a less poetic response: ‘Herunterspielen’ – play it down. Chancellor Schmidt’s chief of security told Flamig that the missing uranium was not weapons grade material and it did not matter that it had disappeared. Flamig was left deeply puzzled: ‘What nobody has explained to me is why, if that is the case, did somebody go to so much trouble and expense to acquire it?’

Chapter 20

Consequences