Author: Grant Smith

A majority of Americans believe Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should be investigated by the FBI for nuclear weapons technology smuggling before being allowed to enter the United States according to a new poll.

In 2012 the FBI declassified and released files (PDF archive) of its investigation into how 800 nuclear weapons triggers were illegally smuggled from the U.S. to Israel. According to the FBI, the Israeli Ministry of Defense ordered nuclear triggers (krytrons), encrypted radios, ballistic missile propellants and other export-prohibited items through a network of front companies. Smuggling ring operations leader Richard Kelly Smyth alleged that Netanyahu worked at one of the fronts – Heli Trading owned by confessed spy and Hollywood producer Arnon Milchan – and met with him frequently to execute smuggling operations.

Continue reading “Poll: Netanyahu Should be Investigated for Nuclear Weapons Tech Smuggling Before US Visit”

The following is being released by the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy:

A federal lawsuit seeks immediate release of a closely held government report about how American branches of Israeli charitable and educational institutes fund secret nuclear weapons research and development programs.

An unclassified 1987 study conducted for the Department of Defense titled "Current Technology Issues in Israel" discovered Technion University technicians developing nuclear missile re-entry vehicles and working at the Dimona nuclear weapons production facility. Hebrew University computer scientists working at the Soreq nuclear facilities were "developing the kind of codes which will enable them to make hydrogen bombs." Israel’s Weizmann Institute "studied high energy physics and hydrodynamics needed for nuclear bomb design, and worked on lasers to enrich uranium, the most advanced method for making the material dropped on Hiroshima in 1945" say sources attributed to the report cited in the lawsuit.

IRmep filed suit for the report in the DC District Court as part of a public-interest drive to obtain long overdue enforcement of the Symington and Glenn Amendments to the Foreign Assistance Act. The laws prohibit U.S. foreign aid to nuclear weapons states such as Israel that are not signatories to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

A recent Google Consumer Survey (PDF) reveals that despite longstanding Israeli and US government gag orders on publicly discussing the arsenal, 63.9 percent of Americans now believe Israel possesses nuclear weapons. 60.7 percent of Americans oppose sending the largest share (9 percent) of the US foreign aid budget to Israel.

Israel’s Weizmann Institute, Technion, and Hebrew University raise substantial tax-exempt charitable funding through affiliates in the United States creating a "tax gap" that must be financed by individual American taxpayers. According to their most recent IRS filings, American branches of the three organizations raise a combined $172 million in annual US tax-exempt funding. IRmep’s "request for determination" filings with the IRS reveal that secret foreign nuclear weapons development has no recognized US tax-deductible "social welfare" purpose.

Defendants Department of Defense, the DC US Attorney Office and Attorney General have until October 30 to respond to IRmep’s public interest lawsuit demanding release of the explosive report. The Center for Policy and Law Enforcement is a unit of the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy in Washington. Inquiries about the lawsuit or opinion poll results may be directed to Grant F. Smith at info@irmep.org or 202-342-7325.

The U.S. Department of Defense guided the National Security Council’s development of an official Obama administration position on the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers clean-up of toxic waste site in Pennsylvania. U.S. taxpayers will pay up to half a billion to clean up the former Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation toxic dump, even as plaintiffs sue NUMEC’s successors for hundreds of millions in wrongful death and health-related lawsuits. Meanwhile, the highest declassification panel in the United States may finally decide to release files confirming what top CIA officials have long claimed – that NUMEC’s sole original purpose was as a smuggling front that illegally diverted U.S. government-owned weapons-grade uranium into the Israeli nuclear weapons program in the 1960s.

US Energy Department documents (PDF) released under FOIA on June 19 reveal new details about secret discussions held by the CIA, DoD, FBI, NSC, and EPA about NUMEC a year ago. The 2012 meetings took place after a contractor ran into unexpected difficulties cleaning up the NUMEC waste dump in Parks Township. Emails coordinating the “scrambled together” Washington meeting reveal surprisingly top-down DoD and Obama administration leadership of the cleanup. “Pentagon is bringing their proposed path forward to NSC staff to discuss admin position…” states one email from Douglas Tonkay of the DOE’s Office of Environmental Management. But why would the DoD and White House be so intimately involved in a mundane toxic cleanup? Because the NUMEC question is anything but mundane.

Beginning in the 1960s, NUMEC received 25 tons of government-owned weapons-grade uranium to process into nuclear fuel for the US Navy and top-secret programs such as nuclear rockets and satellite fuel. NUMEC “lost” more HEU than any government contractor, leading to ongoing FBI, CIA and NSA investigations into whether the plant’s owners had collaborated with Israeli intelligence operatives and nuclear weapons development experts who frequented the plant. According to a Department of Energy report in 2001, the now-shuttered NUMEC now holds the dubious record of "losing" more weapons-grade uranium (PDF) than any other US processing facility. Although CIA officials such as former Tel Aviv Station Chief John Hadden publicly claimed NUMEC was “an Israeli operation from the start,” American presidents from LBJ to Obama successfully quashed all public requests for release of thousands of pages of NUMEC-related top-secret government documents. Official US treatment of NUMEC as a pollution issue, rather than a crime scene and challenge to governance, has punished direct victims sickened by the shoddy smuggling-front’s operations.

Continue reading “Obama’s NUMEC Nuclear Diversion Cover-Up”

Fifty years ago this May, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee opened a series of unprecedented hearings investigating the clandestine activities of foreign agents active in the United States. The investigation focused most intensively on the operatives and financing of key Israel lobbying organizations such as the American Zionist Council, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and the American Section of the quasi-governmental Jerusalem-based Jewish Agency. Thanks to a secret memo only declassified in 2010, the public may now know what fears motivated the hearings.

The March 17, 1961 staff report expressed concerns that “indigenous groups based on racial or national origins have been organized in the United States, and have often concentrated on influencing United States foreign policy in directions designed primarily to promote the interests of other states.” The Senate was particularly – though not exclusively – concerned about Israel-coordinated overseas provocations intended to tripwire the United States into action. “Operation Susannah,” an all-but-forgotten 1954 Israeli false flag terror attack on U.S. facilities in Egypt designed to keep international forces stationed in the Suez Canal zone is mentioned twice as a reason for investigating “how they do it.” Although such a line of inquiry was clearly “explosive” the Senate proposal included having “testimony on the Lavon Affair, and similar ‘gray area’ activities.”

The Senate and a parallel Justice Department investigation uncovered a massive money-laundering scheme by which the Jewish Agency – using its access to Israeli government funding and tax exempt donations from the United States – illegally funneled tens of millions into public relations and lobbying efforts conducted by the top U.S. lobby – the American Zionist Council. Isaiah Kenen, the leader of the AZC’s unincorporated lobbying division called the American Israel Public Affairs Committee – also received Jewish Agency funding, laundered through his privately-owned lobbying newsletter.

Continue reading “1963: The year the Israel Lobby Transcended US Law”

A November Washington Post report by national security journalist Walter Pincus revealed the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was building a mysterious underground facility for the Israel Defense Forces near Tel Aviv. Deeper in the report Pincus claimed, "Over the years, the Corps has built underground hangers for Israeli fighter-bombers, facilities for handling nuclear weapons (though Israel does not admit having such weapons), command centers, training bases, intelligence facilities and simulators, according to Corps publications."

Pincus did not respond to an immediate email request for citations of USACE publications detailing "facilities for handling nuclear weapons, " but a January 4, 2013 Freedom of Information Act request to USACE Humphreys Engineer Support Center in Alexandria requesting documents summarizing "its role in building nuclear weapons handling facilities in Israel" was swiftly answered.

USACE’s response was unusually comprehensive. (PDF) "This office is responsible for administering requests involving USACE Headquarters. The USACE Europe District is the office responsible for projects involving Israel. I have coordinated with the Europe District and have been informed that none of the facilities that USACE has been involved with were nuclear weapons handling facilities; therefore I will not be requesting that a document search be conducted."

Although an appeal demanding that USACE Europe actually conduct a bona fide document search was filed on January 22, no further replies have been forthcoming. Walter Pincus has written no more about the U.S. lending a helpful hand in Israel’s officially unacknowledged nuclear arsenal. If Pincus is wrong about USACE, it would not be the first time the veteran reporter has gotten basic facts about an important story completely wrong. Although then a fairly recent graduate of Georgetown Law School, Pincus misinterpreted basic facts about the 1917 Espionage Act in a 2006 story. Pincus then engaged in a long fight after the ombudsman’s attention was brought to the issue. Although the flawed Pincus story contributed to the Post’s overall editorial line that criminal charges against two AIPAC officials indicted for espionage should be dropped, to its credit the newspaper publicly corrected the Pincus helpful error a month later.

Hinting that the U.S. government has an ongoing official—though deeply secret—role in helping Israel develop and deploy nuclear weapons is a line periodically pushed by Israel lobby partisans when uncomfortable facts about questionable funding flows from the U.S. or illicit material and technology diversions arise. For Pincus, the "USACE nuke facilities" story may mark the final twist of his long transformation from the Israel lobby’s fiercest investigator under Senator J. W. Fulbright in the 1960s to just another lobby trumpet in the establishment media. In the short reference Pincus upholds the ever-less-credible policy of "strategic ambiguity" while insinuating an official U.S. role. While it is remotely possible the USACE is fibbing and Pincus is right, if that is true all future U.S. funding to Israel will have to be cut under foreign aid restrictions mandated by the Symington and Glenn Amendments. Or perhaps the Corps built nuclear facilities without understanding their purpose. Whatever the truth, Americans deserve far more clarity and fact-based reporting about how their tax dollars may be funding Israel’s nuclear weapons.

Grant Smith is Director of the Institute for Research: Middle East Policy, Inc.

FBI Wades Into Obama’s Commutation Process

The Interagency Security Classification Appeals Panel recently forced the CIA to release additional content from its 1987 Jonathan Pollard espionage damage assessment report (PDF). The National Security Archive – which appealed this declassification case to ISCAP – and many establishment media outlets characterize the partially released contents as something of an exoneration of the "cooperative" Pollard, whom the CIA debriefed under polygraph. They applaud the "good faith" of Pollard’s Israeli handlers who are said to have largely tasked the theft of classified U.S. documents that were of immediate and exclusive use defending Israel – but unfairly withheld by America despite intelligence sharing agreements. If this framing were true, it would make the ISCAP release extremely timely as the Obama administration moves into the final stages of Pollard’s for request for executive clemency. However, an examination of the still-heavily-redacted CIA report against other recently declassified files about the activities of other assets handled by Israeli spymaster Rafael Eitan – reveal is not quite the "get out of jail free" card so many claim. Other documents now in the declassification pipeline may further erode the benign portrayal of Pollard’s activities – though not necessarily in time to prevent his early release.

Although CIA’s damage assessment claims Pollard’s handlers "concentrated on providing Israel with US intelligence on the military forces and equipment of Arab and Islamic states and on Soviet military forces, equipment and technology" many such bullet points and assertions are followed by other large censored sections that leave readers wondering what other tasking was documented by the CIA. It may be that the blanked-out sections refer to other American assets run by Rafael Eitan – an Israeli spymaster who has probably done more damage to United states than any other Middle Eastern spy – that were better situated to deliver the goods. Pollard is far from Israel’s only successful spy. Eitan himself visited the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (NUMEC) in 1968, a facility that "lost" more weapons-grade uranium than any other nuclear fuel processor in the US. Eitan would have likely relied on NUMEC president Zalman Shapiro and other helpful American colleagues for advanced hydrogen bomb designs and other assistance in the early 1970s. Eitan’s involvement in obtaining source code of the PROMIS intelligence case management program, a system compromised with secret back doors that was to be installed at the Justice Department and various foreign intelligence services, would have been a good source for "dirt" the CIA report claims Eitan wanted but that Pollard’s more sensible handlers vetoed. Continue reading “Partially Declassified CIA Assessment Does Not Exonerate Jonathan Pollard”