Spyfail, p.15
Spyfail, page 15
At Patrick Air Force Base, two specially equipped WC-135B aircraft, code-named Constant Phoenix, were quickly scrambled to hunt for particulate nuclear debris and residue in the South Atlantic and over Antarctica. Known as “sniffers,” they were modified Boeing 707s and belonged to AFTAC’s Technical Operations Squadron. The on-board atmospheric collection systems and filters allow the crew to detect radioactive “clouds” in real time. Later joined by three other WC-135Bs, they would eventually conduct a total of twenty-five sorties totaling more than 230 hours of flying time within that remote void. In requesting from the government of the French island of Mauritius permission to operate out of their airfield, officials were simply told the planes were conducting weather missions.
That night, Carter and his family traveled by motorcade to Spring Hill, Brzezinski’s secluded estate nearby in McLean, Virginia, for dinner, returning at 10:33 p.m. Shortly thereafter, as he did several times a day, Carter made a note in his private diary. “There was indication of a nuclear explosion in the region of South Africa,” he wrote, “either South Africa, Israel using a ship at sea, or nothing.”
The next day, the committee reconvened at 11 a.m. in the crowded Situation Room. For Brzezinski, it was his home away from home, his having once even judged a pumpkin-carving contest there. A briefing board had been sent over from CIA headquarters displaying the broad area where the blast took place. “Limited satellite detection information suggests that a nuclear explosion (1–3KT [kilotons]) probably occurred early Saturday morning in the South Atlantic, southern Indian Ocean, southern Africa, or Antarctica,” said the notes. A decision was made to keep news of the clandestine nuclear detonation as secret as possible, only informing the top members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees.
Eventually, as more and more evidence arrived, the spy agencies became unanimous in their view. “The Intelligence Community has high confidence, after intense technical scrutiny of satellite data, that a low yield atmospheric nuclear explosion occurred in the early morning hours of September 22,” said a Secret/Sensitive Department of State document. It was prepared for a high-level White House meeting on October 23. The CIA agreed in a separate secret report, and “assessed the probability of a nuclear test as 90% plus.”
Around the same time, doubts began to grow about the technical ability of South Africa to build and test a completed nuclear weapon. “[South Africa] had enough fissile material (95% enriched) to test in 1979,” said Professor Anna-Mart van Wyk, a South African nuclear historian. “And had enough material to have assembled a bomb by the end of 1979, though may not have had enough for [both] a test and a bomb.” Attention, as a result, turned to Israel. Dimona had long since ceased to be a secret, and the question wasn’t whether Israel could construct a nuclear weapon, but how many it had already built. Both the State Department and CIA addressed the issue of Israel in their reports. “We must consider the possibility that Israel could have detonated a device in this remote geographical area,” said State.
And addressing the issue of “A Secret Test by Israel,” the CIA outlined a number of reasons why the state might have wanted to carry out a hidden nuclear test. Among them was “developing the fission trigger [an atom bomb] for a thermonuclear weapon [an H-bomb]… A low-yield nuclear test conducted clandestinely at sea could have enabled them to make basic measurements of the device’s performance.” It also considered as a possibility a joint Israel–South Africa nuclear test. “Clandestine arrangements between South Africa and Israel for joint testing operations might have been negotiable,” it said, with South Africa providing Israel with logistical assistance. Finally, the report noted, “Indeed, of all the countries which might have been responsible for the 22 September event, Israel would probably have been the only one for which a clandestine approach would have been virtually its only option.”
The problem for Israel was the Glenn Amendment to the Arms Export Control Act passed by Congress in 1977. Aimed particularly at the nuclear pariah states, it mandated an end to arms assistance, and an automatic application of extensive U.S. sanctions, if the president determined that any state (other than the nuclear states authorized by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty) detonated a nuclear explosive after 1977. For Israel, it would mean an instant end to their annual $3.8 billion aid package, along with other harsh sanctions, such as travel restrictions. And that would not be good for Carter, since he was hoping to win reelection the following year and needed support from the Jewish community. He therefore had a political interest in ensuring that Israel’s secrets remained secret, regardless of the detrimental effect on the United States and the world, by turning a blind eye to its nuclear lawlessness. Lawlessness that included turning Americans into spies and stealing U.S. nuclear materials, traitorous acts that could be punishable by death.
The concern over a potential Jewish backlash greatly troubled the president’s top aide, Hamilton Jordan, according to Carter biographer Kai Bird. “Hamilton Jordan was specifically apprehensive about the ‘Jewish lobby,’” noted Bird. In a candid and confidential 1977 memo to Carter, Jordan outlined the risks of offending the lobby. “We are aware of its strength and influence,” he wrote, “but don’t understand the basis for that strength nor the way that it is used politically.” Money and power were key, he noted, pointing out that Jews made up less than 3 percent of the U.S. population but comprised 60 percent of the large donors to the Democratic Party.
Jordan then outlined the role of Israel in American politics. “When people talk about the ‘Jewish lobby’ as relates to Israel, they are referring to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).” And AIPAC, said Jordan, had “one continuing priority—the welfare of the state of Israel as perceived by the American Jewish community.” Among those in agreement was Carter aide David Rubenstein. “Ever since 1948,” he said, “the Jewish American community thought it was their job to support Israel ninety-nine percent. You don’t criticize the Israeli government.” Outing it as a nuclear thief, or finally admitting its nuclear pariah status with its stash of illegal atomic bombs, something known by virtually everyone, verged on political suicide.
Beyond politics, American’s national security was very much at risk. The Camp David peace accords between Israel and Egypt had concluded the previous March. But before the meetings, Egypt, Syria, and Iraq had made it clear to Carter that confirmation of a nuclear test by Israel would force them to also seek an Arab nuclear capability, if not war. A war that would certainly draw in and involve the United States.
Unlike plutonium, the secret of this clandestine nuclear test had a very short half-life, lasting barely a month. On the evening of October 25, ABC News correspondent John Scali let the atomic cat out of the bag on the network’s nightly news program. And immediately, the Carter White House chose obfuscation and concealment over candor and honesty. The next day at a press conference, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance declared that “it is not clear that there has been a nuclear detonation,” despite the unanimous opinion of the entire intelligence community that one had taken place. It was the political equivalent of “move along, there’s nothing to see here,” and a substantially different response than if Russia, or any other country, were suspected. It was also the opening lie in what would eventually become an elaborate cover-up.
Following the disclosure on ABC, the Carter White House began a series of briefings for members of Congress, attempting to downplay and raise questions about the evidence of the nuclear event. Among those attending some of the briefings was Leonard Weiss, the top aide to Ohio Democratic senator John Glenn, America’s first person in space. Weiss had an extensive scientific background, having served for a number of years as a professor of mathematics and electrical engineering at Brown University and the University of Maryland. He therefore also acted as Glenn’s chief advisor on the Senate Subcommittee on Energy and Nuclear Proliferation.
What astonished Weiss was the aggressiveness with which the Carter administration officials were attempting to shut down legitimate questions and inquiry into the VELA 6911 detection. At one point, Louis Nosenzo, a deputy assistant secretary of state, actually threatened him. “My questioning,” said Weiss, “caused Louis Nosenzo, who was present at the briefing… to take me aside during a temporary recess of the briefing, and caution me that if I persisted in suggesting that a nuclear test had taken place, my reputation would suffer.” He added, “I was surprised that a Carter State Department official would issue a veiled threat because of my view of the ‘flash’ expressed in a non-public setting. But all it did was to make the administration look desperate to me in its desire to promote a benign explanation for the Vela event.”
What officials believed privately, however, was a different matter. At another point, during a party while Weiss and Glenn were chatting, they were approached by Gerald Smith, the U.S. representative for nonproliferation matters. According to Weiss, Glenn happened to mention that he thought that the Indian government had been “‘bad guys’ on nonproliferation issues.” “At this,” Weiss said, “Smith bristled and said, ‘You think the Indians are bad guys? You want to talk about bad guys, talk about the Israelis!’” According to Weiss, “I think Smith may have been telling Glenn that he believed those analysts in the intelligence community who thought Israel was the most likely perpetrator.”
Much to the chagrin of the White House, secret study after secret study confirmed that a clandestine nuclear detonation had taken place, including one convened by the CIA. Unwilling to accept the evidence and opinions of his own government agencies as they were coming in, all of which pointed unanimously to a nuclear detonation, with Israel as the likely culprit, Carter instead opted for a cover-up. The idea was to bury details of the blast, along with the identity of the likely perpetrator, under layers of Restricted Data secrecy, then establish his own panel, run by his own White House science advisor, and reporting only to Carter. The end goal was delay, confusion, and obfuscation until no one cared anymore. Carter’s science advisor, Frank Press, picked nine scientists with a wide variety of backgrounds, histories, and disciplines. Then he chose an old friend, Jack Ruina, as chairman. A professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, Ruina had once headed the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency.
The group began their work on November 1, and just a week later, after their first meeting, they had already come up with “preliminary results.” Much to Carter’s liking, they quickly rejected the nuclear detonation explanation and instead suggested the bhangmeters were triggered by a meteoroid, a theory rejected by previous studies. From then on, the panel seemed irritated that they had to listen to witness after witness from the intelligence and nuclear weapons communities present their evidence that a nuclear explosion had in fact taken place. The Arecibo scientists who detected the anomaly in the ionosphere referred to their meeting with the panel as “mass confusion” and “an exercise in distraction.”
Among the members of the White House panel was Richard Garwin, who a few days after the VELA 6911 alert was convinced, by two-to-one odds, that the evidence indicated a nuclear detonation. But mysteriously, as more and more evidence began pouring in pointing to Israel as the perpetrator, he changed his mind. It would later come out that Garwin believed that Israel, and only Israel, is justified in maintaining a secret, illegal cache of nuclear weapons. “Israel certainly has more than 100, maybe 200 [nuclear weapons], and is the state among them all that needs nuclear weapons most,” he said in 2008, “because they could easily be overrun by the populous neighboring states in a matter of hours without nuclear weapons.” In fact, nuclear weapons aside, “Israel remains the most powerful and well-equipped military force in the region, supported by its strategic ally, the United States,” according to the Institute for International and Strategic Studies. And according to a 2019 headline in the Jerusalem Post, “Israel ranks as the 8th most powerful country” in the world. As Haaretz’s Nir Gontarz noted, “It’s an open secret that with regard to military power and military superiority, Israel is no longer the tiny David facing the giant Goliath. For several decades now, the roles have been reversed.” Which raises the question, Why has U.S. defense funding remained at the same extraordinarily high levels?
By January 1980 the White House panel was ready to wrap up its work and issue its report rejecting the nuclear explosion explanation in favor of the meteoroid. But suddenly there was angry pushback from the spy agencies. Even CIA director Stansfield Turner never “bought” the panel report and had always believed that the Israelis were behind the nuclear detonation. The rebellion greatly worried the Carter White House, enough to make them re-review the evidence, if just to mollify the spy agencies. “They have sufficient doubts about the [White House] panel report to make it very dangerous to proceed without another look,” said a secret internal White House memorandum.
As a result, it was decided to appease the intelligence community by extending the review. Otherwise, said the secret memo, “there will be continued internal dissent and an appearance that policy people (including the White House) did a whitewash for political reasons.” Another secret memorandum referred to the intelligence officials derogatorily as “dissenters,” as if they were refusing to proclaim a Kremlin-dictated explanation. A memorandum from White House staffer Jerry Oplinger confirmed the view of the intelligence community that the second review was simply for show. He wrote that the “main objective [of the new review] is to hear the dissenters out so that we can more safely ignore them.”
In the end, Carter got what he wanted, although in private even he didn’t believe the meteoroid explanation. Instead, in secret, he preferred the unanimous views of the intelligence community scientists. On February 27, 1980, as the panel was nearing completion of its report, Carter again made an entry in his private diary. “We have a growing belief among our scientists that the Israelis did indeed conduct a nuclear test explosion in the ocean near the southern end of South Africa.” He would later note that during his time in the White House, he never intended his diary to ever become public. It was a decision he made much later after leaving office, a time when he no longer had to protect Israel in order to win votes and receive millions in donations.
In May, after a total of just three meetings, the panel completed its report. As it had concluded in its very first meeting, rather than having detected a nuclear explosion, VELA 6911 was instead the victim of a micrometeor impact. The White House quickly released the report to the press in the middle of Carter’s presidential campaign. “For political reasons,” Brzezinski responded years later when asked why Carter did what he did. The problem of confronting Israel, and thereby outraging AIPAC and the numerous other pro-Israel special interest groups, was eliminated. But it came at a high cost to the nation in terms of honor, credibility, and safety.
By 1979, at the time of the test, Dimona would likely have produced at least dozens, if not scores, of atomic bombs, which rely on fission, the splitting of an atom.
The next step would be to develop far more powerful thermonuclear hydrogen bombs, which use fusion, and are a thousand times more powerful than the early atomic bombs. Rather than destroying a few square miles of a city with a bomb measured in kilotons, thermonuclear weapons are designed to take out hundreds of square miles with megatons of destructive power. And critical would be supplying them all with professionally made triggers to make them explode, triggers identical to the ones developed for “Fat Man,” the bulbous plutonium-fueled atom bomb dropped by the United States on the Japanese city of Nagasaki, killing upward of eighty thousand people.
The nuclear equivalent of blasting caps, the triggers, known as “krytrons,” consist of cold-cathode gas-filled tubes and appear somewhat similar to small halogen lightbulbs, but with four long, thin electrodes at the bottom.
Despite their diminutive appearance, however, these triggers are highly complex instruments capable of emitting simultaneous high-powered electrical pulses in a fraction of a millionth of a second. The long, spidery electrodes are attached to detonators connected to the bomb’s spherical shell, which is made up of thirty-two geometric-shaped high-velocity explosive charges arranged in a sort of soccer-ball pattern. Once the krytrons trigger the detonators, the simultaneous explosions create a massive shock wave that races inward to the weapon’s plutonium core. Suddenly compressed to a supercritical state, the core implodes violently as it is heated to billions of degrees Celsius. That is followed by an enormous fireball, a mini-sun, as a shock wave simultaneously radiates outward. Then comes the familiar mushroom cloud and the widespread release of radiation. But it all starts with a krytron.
The men behind the development of the krytron were Dr. Harold Edgerton, Kenneth J. Germeshausen, and Herbert E. Grier. After the war they formed a company, EG&G Corporation, based in Massachusetts. Joining them was Bernard J. O’Keefe, who installed the krytrons on “Fat Man” before it was dropped on Nagasaki. In addition to selling a variety of advanced electrical equipment, EG&G was the only company in the world that offered the highly restricted krytrons. EG&G, therefore, had now become Blumberg and Milchan’s top target.
What they needed was a secret American agent to operate a clandestine U.S.-based front company like NUMEC, which covertly supplied Israel with weapons-grade uranium. A company that could legally order the krytrons, and then illegally ship them to Israel. That was where Richard Kelly Smyth came in.
