In an obituary of the late Rafi Eitan, Israeli journalist Yossi Melman notes that the legendary Mossad operative played a leading role in another operation obtaining uranium for Israel’s secret nuclear program.
I reported last week on Eitan’s role in diverting several hundred pounds of fissile material from a uranium refining facility in Pennysylvania.
Melman reports on another one of Eitan’s exploits in the nuclear field, also in 1968.
At the time Israeli officials were assuring the U.S. government that they had no intention to build a nuclear weapon. But they assigned Eitan to get the uranium to do just that.
Melman:
Israeli intelligence registered a front company in Europe. The firm bought 200 tons of uranium from a Belgian company that was eager to get rid of it. The uranium was loaded on a ship that Eitan and his colleague had purchased posing as foreign businessmen. The cargo was transferred at sea to another vessel and then unloaded at an Israeli port and shipped to fuel the Dimona reactor in order to produce nuclear bombs.
Melman’s reporting puts THE DEEP STATE story in context.
That same year, he visited the U.S. Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation plant in Apollo, Pennsylvania, which dealt which recycled uranium waste for the U.S. Department of Energy. The plant was owned by Zalman Shapiro, a Jewish American who was an ardent Zionist and contributed money to the Israeli intelligence charity. Eitan never admitted what he did at the plant, but it has long been suspected that he facilitated the theft of uranium for Israel’s nuclear arsenal.
John Hadden, former CIA station chief in Israel, concluded Eitan was behind the theft of material from NUMEC. So did Roger Mattson, lead investigator for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Source: Remembering Israel’s Most Celebrated Spy – Foreign Policy
