Black Market of Horror: SPIEGEL Cover Story, issue 05/2004 

In Jerusalem the subject is still considered a state secret, but experts all over the world agree: Israel is the only state in the Middle East to have atom bombs. "Operation Samson" was a triumph on the part of ambitious politicians, scientists and spies - with dramatic consequences. By Erich Follath

In researching a story about Israel’s secret nuclear potential and its bizarre beginnings, one cannot but encounter three characters: Shimon the Peace-Loving (politician), Rafi the Stinker (spy) and Mordecai the Doubter (scientist).

The first received the Nobel Peace Prize in1994 and has moved among the topmost circles of the Israeli Establishment for over 50 years. The second attained high honors in the realms of secret services, but fell from the ruling echelon’s favor in the mid-80s for some rather shady activities. The third has spent more than 17 years in a maximum-security cell of Ashkelon Prison - as traitor to Israel.

The careers of Shimon Peres, 80, Rafi Eitan, 77, and Mordecai Vanunu, 49, reflect central stages in the history of the Jewish state - its successes, its defeats and its inner conflicts. And they touch on a taboo that is officially maintained to this day and is only slowly being laid open by independent historians and journalists.

Shimon Peres, from the shtetl of Vishniva in what is today Belarus, emigrated with his family to British-controlled Palestine when he was eleven years old. As a young man he joined the underground Jewish army Haganah, but always strove for negotiation rather than terrorism as a way to deal with the occupation forces. Moderate and ambitious, but always an ardent patriot, he quickly made a career for himself, and as early as 1953 he became Director-General of the Ministry of Defense - Number Two in Israel’s security matters, answerable only to David Ben-Gurion.

That legendary head of government and founding father of Israel is obsessed with the idea that the Holocaust might be repeated, and his central fear is that this time the Jews would be driven to the brink of extinction by fanatical Arabs. Ben-Gurion seeks a weapon against this helplessness that will work even if the enemy seems superior in strength: "Never again will we let ourselves be led like lambs to the slaughter." He is eagerly interested in modern technologies and reads everything he can about the potential of nuclear fission; he wants the atom bomb. "What the three Jews Einstein, Oppenheimer and Teller did for the Americans, Jewish scientists could also do for their own people,” he writes in a 1956 letter to a friend.

Ben-Gurion instructs Shimon Peres to do everything to make this dream a reality; the ultimate Zionist project. Ben-Gurion lacks the necessary antenna to pick up on the potential fears of the Palestinians, who have already lived for centuries in the “land without a people” and who are being expelled from their homeland en masse.

The project is so top-secret that the name Peres does not appear anywhere in the ranks of the state’s nuclear committees or in their publications; not even other Cabinet members know about the clandestine "Operation Samson", named for the fabled Israeli superman and terror of the Philistines of Biblical times.

Peres has no illusions that any of the three powers who possess nuclear capability would share the technology with the Jewish state. The Soviet Union and Great Britain are not an option. Even the USA are only willing to supply a tiny reactor for the purpose of generating power - and they warn the Israelis against having nuclear ambitions.

Peres sees his chance somewhere else. He turns to Paris; in those days France was just beginning to develop its nuclear weapons program and in fall of 1956 she sees no strategic obstacles to helping the Israelis in exchange for secret intelligence information and scientific collaboration. The French and the Israelis share the same interests in the battle against Arab dreams of superpower status. In a co-ordinated campaign, British, French and Israeli armed forces storm the Suez Canal and the Sinai Peninsula. Out of gratitude, Premier Guy Mollet enters into a secret treaty with Peres in 1957 and promises Peres the know-how to build a large reactor at Dimona in the Negev Desert. The reactor is able to produce plutonium - the stuff atom bombs are made of.

When the official Israeli atomic energy commission sees the construction plans for Dimona, the result is an uproar. Six out of seven scientists resign their posts. They understand that it paves the way for Israel to become a nuclear power; their comments range from “outrageously risky” to “insane”. But even the drop-outs are sworn to silence, under threat of punishment. The world is not supposed to know what’s going on in the remote desert town 30 kilometers southeast of Beersheba. Officially, what’s being built there is a “textile factory”.

ISRAEL’S SECRET SERVICE MAKES A SHIP FULL OF URANIUM VANISH IN THE MEDITERRANEAN.

Ben-Gurion showers Peres with praise. But one suspects that the rather vain politician suffers not a little - he cannot let his brilliant diplomatic achievement as “Father of the Bomb” become public knowledge. And through the need to deal secretly, for years, with a small group of scientists, political strategists and secret agents, he becomes estranged from the military establishment. Once he is appointed Minister of Defense, Peres the civilian “with no prior service” never quite manages to secure the respect of the generals and the troops. As well, the Israeli voters, who repeatedly snub him at election time, seem to sense somehow that this man is not always honest with them - no matter how good his reasons and how severe his pangs of conscience may be.

Rafi Eitan is quite different: lies, cover-ups and deception are no effort for him, but rather his elixir of life. Even in the battle against the British he already forged papers and fought with brutal resolution at the head of the "Palmach" underground strike forces, and then in Israel’s war of independence against the Arabs. In the early 1950s, Eitan, who had grown up in a kibbutz, signs up with the new state’s secret service.

Externally, he’s anything but a James Bond: short, nearsighted, with an absurdly large chest and biceps; ever since a bombing accident he has been deaf in his left ear. He is considered hard towards his friends, ruthless towards enemies. On daredevil missions behind enemy lines he has repeatedly “choked [Arab fighters] to death with his bare hands, and enjoyed it” - according to his own words. Rafi Hamasriach is what his secret service colleagues call him: Rafi the Stinker. They say it very respectfully, but are perhaps also a little repelled by his ice-cold nature.

Eitan became the hero of well-known Mossad commando raids. In 1960, for example, he played a decisive role in the abduction of the Nazi criminal Adolf Eichmann from Argentina. After an Israeli court sentenced Eichmann, the master spy insisted on accompanying the delinquent to his execution. "I hope you’re going to follow me soon," were Eichmann’s last words to his captor.

Three years later, Rafi Eitan participated once again in an “abduction” - but this time the target was not a person, but rather fissionable material for the atom bomb. Unlike France, who terminated her nuclear collaboration with Israel in 1962, Israel possesses no uranium mines in allied African states and especially not enough highly enriched material. Such “hot” material is not available through legal channels. A Mossad team put out feelers to locate secret avenues of supply. They searched for weak points in the network of international control – and for potential sympathizers.

Twice, under dramatic circumstances, Rafi & Co. struck it lucky. Once with a small American company, located in Apollo (Pennsylvania) and belonging to a brilliant young scientist. Zalman Shapiro is the son of an orthodox rabbi who lost part of his family in the Holocaust, an ardent Zionist and admirer of Israel. His company "Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corp. (Numec)" supplied the quickly growing number of commercial nuclear reactors. As well, the plant temporarily stored larger quantities of highly enriched uranium for government contracts.

The Mossad team manages to divert the precious material and to transport it to Israel. Numec director Shapiro does not report the loss. It is months before the United States Atomic Energy Commission discovers, in the course of routine checks, that more than 100 kilos of uranium have disappeared. Shapiro can’t explain it, and the evidence is not enough for an indictment.

Soon after that, he shut Numec down. A later investigative report by the American Congress stated cryptically: "It is possible that significant quantities of highly enriched uranium were diverted with the active help of a man in the factory or by a group availing themselves of such an inside man."

The Mossad’s second coup was even more incredible. With forged papers Eitan arranges the purchase of 200 tons of uranium oxide from the Brussels firm "Société Générale des Mineraux". Possibly without even being aware of it, the German businessman and company partner Herbert Schulzen and his Wiesbaden firm “Asmara Chemie GmbH” serve as the Israelis’ intermediary, depositing 8.5 million Marks in a Swiss bank as a bond for the deal.

A company in Italy is listed as end user – the deal remains within the EWG and therefore seems relatively unsuspicious. Nobody in Brussels suspects that the Italian dye factory has never had anything to do with uranium before and only signed the papers because it considers itself merely a middleman, tempted by a hefty commission. The supervisory body Euratom approves the purchase.

But the hot goods never arrive in the destination port in Genoa. Top agent Eitan has thought of everything, and bought a worn-out 1000-ton freighter from a Hamburg ship owner. The "Scheersberg A" takes on the load in Antwerp – and then vanishes in the Mediterranean. Later on, embarrassed Euratom functionaries reconstruct how the trip must have gone. Somewhere near Cyprus, on the high seas, the uranium barrels were reloaded onto a “legal” Israeli ship that took the goods home to Haifa. And from there, they were shipped to Dimona, to serve in the manufacture of several atom bombs. Rafi the Stinker is promote to Vice-Chief of the Mossad.

In late 1968 the "Scheersberg" reappears in southern Turkey; there is no trace of her crew. The logbook contains no entries for the trip from Antwerp. Uranium buyer Schulzen declares that he only carried out the deal in the role of intermediary, on behalf of a client he did not know. He feels “used by the secret services”. Had the Mossad acted alone in this? Or did the CIA and BND actively support Israel in its scheme to pave the Jewish state’s way to atomic power?

A SCIENTIST TAKES SECRET ATOMIC PICTURES – AND SELLS THEM TO THE WORLD MEDIA.

On the few occasions when Eitan spoke with journalists – after he retired from active espionage - he passionately denied any such help. In fact it took the CIA years to uncover the Israeli nuclear weapons program. In late 1960, when John F. Kennedy learned the true purpose of the “textile factory” at Dimona, he expressed grave concern. At the start of his term of office, JFK was more favorably disposed towards Israel than almost any previous American President had been - "after all, New York Jews voted me into office, now I have to do something for them," he said to friends – but his fear of the proliferation of nuclear weapons was even stronger.

Kennedy gave Ben-Gurion an ultimatum to put Dimona under the supervision of specialists. Ben-Gurion balked, but realized that inspections could no longer be avoided. When the American scientists arrived for their (pre-announced) inspection, the Israeli secret service managed to lead them up the garden path.

In 1967 Israel constructed its first, primitive atom bomb, and not even the Americans managed to miss that. When asked, the Israelis fobbed the White House off with a deliberately wishy-washy standard phrase which the diplomat Shimon Peres uses frequently and which expresses official Israeli policy to this day: "We will not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons in the Middle East."

Following the Egyptian and Syrian surprise attack on Yom Kippur 1973, the military situation is so desperate that – as we know today from secret service reports - Prime Minister Golda Meïr orders her Minister of Defense Mosche Dajan to ready 13 bombs for deployment. For several days around October 9, the world teeters on the edge of a nuclear war. But even before the weapons are armed, the tables turn and Israel’s conventional armed forces gain the upper hand. The 13 bombs are returned to their underground desert bunkers.

There is nothing Israel’s politicians fear more than the possibility that an enemy Arab nation could get its hands on a potential for nuclear destruction. Ever since the 1970s Jerusalem has observed with great concern the rapid nuclear advances of Iraq in particular. With help from France, Saddam Hussein built a most suspicious nuclear reactor in Tuweitha south of Baghdad. Israel’s Prime Minister Menachem Begin sees only one chance to stop Saddam: he orders the elimination of the "Osirak" plant.

In the early morning hours of June 7, 1981, Begin launches eight F-16 fighter planes, armed with 1,000-kilo bombs and accompanied by six F-15 interceptors. They reduce the reactor, located 900 kilometers from the Israeli border, to rubble and ashes. Before the Iraqis have even realized what happened, the bomber planes have returned unscathed to their base near Eilat.

It’s a triumph for the Mossad, that hatched the plans for the daredevil attack – and a defeat for Peres. This prudent politician, at that time a member of the Opposition, had been one of the few politicians to be made privy to the plan, and had argued vehemently against it as being too great a risk to the lives of the pilots as well as to future relations with the Arab nations. But after a brief storm of outrage, which the USA also join (“breach of international law”), the indignation dies down.

Israel soon gets comfortable with the idea of being the only Middle Eastern state to have a “bomb in the basement” and grows more and more self-confident in its role as David with a nuclear-powered slingshot. The most eager of them all is the rabble-rousing Minister of Defense (today Prime Minister) Ariel Sharon. According to the political scientist Yoel Cohen, at the start of the Lebanese Campaign in 1982 Sharon urged the Cabinet in all seriousness to prepare a nuclear strike against Syria because the Syrians were allegedly about to attack the Golan Heights.

And yet, there are those in Jerusalem who believe that Israel’s enemies do not take the Jewish state’s ability to launch a nuclear first strike seriously enough. How can awareness of the Israeli arsenal be increased without giving up one’s own policy of concealment?

The most mysterious affair in the history of the mystery-shrouded Israeli nuclear weapons program begins. It is linked to a Moroccan-Jewish name: Mordecai Vanunu.

His parents – he a grocer, she a seamstress – live the life of a middle-class family in Marrakech. Mordecai is one of six children; like the others he grows up trilingual, and speaks Arab and French better than Hebrew. Promises of credit given by the “Jewish Agency” served to lure the sephardic Jews to the Holy Land in 1963 – but after being assigned a modest house in the desert town of Beersheba, they find life there to be rather harder than it had been in their old homeland. Nine-year-old Mordecai attends strictly orthodox schools until he graduates. In military service he proves himself a “very good NCO” (army discharge), but he passes neither his piloting test nor the entrance exam for the Israeli Internal Security Service Shin Bet. He goes to study physics in Tel Aviv, but quits after one year. Like many of the Oriental Jews, his political leanings are strongly right-wing.

Mordecai Vanunu wants to make money quickly and so he applies to the "Nuclear Research Center" Dimona. In 1977 he passes an intensive course in physics, chemistry, mathematics and English – and a security check. He is issued Service ID No. 320, which entitles him to enter "Machon 2". As the new employees now learn, this eight-story, largely underground complex is used to produce plutonium. All of them must sign a pledge of secrecy.

Vanunu becomes inspector of the night shift, a job that takes him through every department of Machon 2. For nine years he does his monotonous routine job reliably and inconspicuously. In the meantime he attends philosophy courses at the University of Beersheba. His specialty is Nietzsche. And in the process his political leanings change. Sharon’s Lebanese War of 1982 and Israel’s harsh occupation policies in West Jordan drive him into the camp of the extreme left-wing. Vanunu gives the student newspaper inflammatory interviews, attends courses given by the Israeli communists – hard to imagine that the omnipresent Internal Security Service could have missed all that.

In December 1985 180 employees are laid off in Dimona, allegedly "for economic reasons". Vanunu is among these – and even before he picks up his discharge papers he joins the Communist Party ("Profession: Student"). But the loner finds no friends in the Party, and an affair with a midwife ends in a break-up. Vanunu decides to take a trip to the Far East. He takes his camera along. Another item in his luggage: exposed film. Explosive photos that the nuclear plant inspector took in the top-secret Machon 2 installation – allegedly without anyone noticing.

Via Athens, Moscow, Bangkok and Kathmandu, Vanunu travels to Sydney. He makes a living there as taxi driver, and in the Anglican Church of St. John he makes friends with the minister. He converts to Christianity. The pacifist Bible studies confirm Vanunu in his rejection of the Israeli nuclear program. "It’s immoral," he says – and shows some of his new brethren photos taken in Dimona. A journalist soon shows up, convinces him to tell all, and makes contact with the “Sunday Times” of London. The newspaper flies Vanunu to the British capital.

The story that is published on October 5, 1986 becomes a world sensation. The politicians may continue to dodge a clear confirmation, but the clearly genuine photos prove it: Israel has approximately 100 to 200 atom bombs.

Even before Vanunu’s revelations were published, the Israeli government (now under the leadership of Prime Minister Peres) decided to take him out of circulation – with a honey-baited bear trap. Under orders from the Mossad, a pretty blonde lady made overtures to him in London and lured him onto a British Airways plane for a holiday in Rome. There, Vanunu disappeared. 40 days later the Israeli government admitted having the “traitor” in custody. There are rumors that he had been drugged in Rome and abducted on a ship. In a secret trial a court in Jerusalem sentenced Vanunu to 18 years in prison, most of them in isolation.

The utter failure of the Dimona supervisory authorities is puzzling to this day. Or did Israel’s secret service itself keep nuclear plant inspector Vanunu on a deceptively long leash? “The most plausible explanation is that the Mossad got wise to the scientist Vanunu and decided to give him the opportunity to tell about his explosive discoveries," says British nuclear expert Frank Barnaby.

These days, the three characters from the nuclear crossroads - Shimon the Peace-Loving, Rafi the Stinker and Mordecai the Doubter – face vastly different futures.

Shimon Peres now speaks surprisingly candidly about Israel’s nuclear alternative: "We did not acquire unusual options in weapons technology in order to repeat Hiroshima, but rather to enforce something like (the peace process of) Oslo.” Even now, at age 80, the versatile politician has not given up hope of attaining a high state office – but it would seem that the hardliners have the upper hand in Israel for the time being.

Rafi Eitan has grown bitter and has withdrawn into private life, to try his hand at business. Sometimes he works as a real estate agent in West Jordan, sometimes as dealer in ornamental fish; his office is in Cuba and he has had several opportunities to meet Fidel Castro. He did not make it to the position of Chief of the Mossad, and since his high-handed recruitment of the scientist Jonathan Pollard, who spied on the United States for Israel, Eitan has become a persona non grata in America.

PLO-Chief Arafat should be put on trial in Israel as a war criminal, just like Eichmann was – so Sharon’s friend Eitan has suggested on Israeli radio. On the websites of hardcore conspiracy theorists Eitan has recently been touted as the man behind the New York terrorist attack of September 11, 2001 – and is said to be currently planning another, no less monstrous deed.

Mordecai Vanunu is supposed to be released from Ashkelon Prison on April 21. An American married couple who adopted him, and an Anglican minister who befriended him, are planning a huge party for him in the United States, which is where the prisoner hopes to emigrate to. His fans have nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize.

As yet it is anything but certain whether he will actually be released. Under a law normally only used against suspected Palestinian terrorists, the Ministry of Defense wants to continue to keep Vanunu behind bars – or at least to release him only on his pledge that he will keep silent about his experiences in Dimona and his abduction.

"I believe in freedom of speech. It is the greatest democratic good," the “traitor” told his adoptive parents.