Nucléaire: Comment Israël a induit en erreur les États-Unis
http://presstv.ir/DetailFr/2016/04/22/461974/Nuclaire-Isral-a-induit-en-erreur-les-tats-Unis/
PRESSTV
Fri Apr 22, 2016 8:17AM
Le Sunday Times du 5 octobre 1986.
Cinquante documents américains du début des années 1960 qui ont été déclassifiés par les archives du National Security aux États-Unis jeudi, ont fait la lumière sur les tentatives d’Israël de cacher l’un de ses secrets les mieux gardés à ce jour: les détails sur son programme nucléaire. A l’époque, les Américains croyaient que les Israéliens fournissaient «des fausses pistes» sur les intentions de construire une bombe.
Les documents comprennent des documents de la Maison Blanche, le Département d’Etat, le Commissariat à l’énergie atomique et les agences de renseignement américaines. Les éditeurs sont Avner Cohen, professeur à l’Institut Middlebury d’études internationales à Monterey, et William Burr, la tête de la documentation des affaires nucléaires à la National Security Archive, qui est basé à l’Université George Washington dans la capitale.
Un document fournit les minutes d’une réunion entre le président américain John F. Kennedy et le Premier ministre David Ben Gourion en mai 30,1961, au Waldorf Astoria à New York.
Selon les détails de cette réunion, déjà publié dans le passé, Ben Gourion a affirmé à Kennedy que le projet de Dimona (Centrale atomique israélienne dans le Neguèv) n’avait aucune dimension militaire et qu’il s’agissait uniquement d’un programme nucléaire à vocation civile.
La transcription américaine dit: «Notre principal – et pour l’instant seul- but est [l’énergie pas cher]. Nous ne savons pas ce qui se passera dans le futur « .
La transcription israélienne dit: «Pour le moment, les seuls objectifs sont la paix … mais nous allons voir ce qui se passe au Moyen-Orient. Il ne dépend pas de nous. «
Dix jours avant cette réunion, une autre réunion clé a eu lieu. Ce fut la première visite d’inspecteurs américains (les Américains les appelaient ‘inspecteurs’ – Israël les appelé ‘visiteurs’) au réacteur de Dimona. Les Israéliens avaient considéré la visite productive. Les inspecteurs croyaient que l’installation était en construction et en conformité avec la description des Israéliens: un réacteur de recherche à des fins pacifiques.
Le rapport complet sur la visite de la Commission américaine de l’énergie atomique fait partie du nouveau lot de documents déclassifiés. Selon le rapport, les techniciens présent à Dimona ont affirmé aux Américains que le réacteur serait probablement doublé d’un autre dans un proche avenir.
« Cela aurait pu servir comme un signal d’avertissement et un indicateur inquiétant : le réacteur était capable de produire beaucoup plus de plutonium et on l’a su à l’époque, » soulignent Cohen et Burr avant dans leurs notes explicatives. En fait, les visiteurs sont rentrés chez eux satisfaits, et leur rapport positif a ouvert la voie à la réunion Kennedy-Ben-Gurion.
Un autre document intéressant du National Intelligence Estimate de la CIA sur Israël a été conçu en Octobre 1961, quelques mois après la réunion Kennedy-Ben-Gurion. Ceci est le seul document déclassifié publié sans suppressions. Il a été publié il y a un an, mais négligé par les chercheurs.
« La signification de ceci est que les Américains savaient que Ben Gourion les avait trompé», dit Cohen. « Ils ne pouvaient pas ou ne voulaient pas l’accuser directement de mentir. Peut-être qu’ils ne voulaient pas révéler ce qu’ils savaient. Il est clair que la communauté du renseignement savait que ce que Ben Gourion avait dit et ce que les inspecteurs ont vu à Dimona étaient loin d’être toute la vérité. «
Les Américains avaient fait pression sur Israël pour permettre une seconde visite à Dimona qui a tourné court, dit Cohen.
« Les inspecteurs américains ont cherché à rencontrer le directeur de Dimona mais il n’était pas là, et l’ingénieurs en chef a organisé une tournée de 40 minutes, beaucoup plus courte que ce qui a été demandé par le protocole.
Après la visite, les Israéliens ont suggéré aux Américains de revenir le lendemain, tout en étant conscient du fait que les Américains allaient rentrer à la maison le lendemain, le prochain vol étant disponible quatre jours plus tard.
De toute façon, la visite était incomplète et Israël a obtenu ce qu’il voulait. Les inspecteurs ont été dûment impressionnés et leur rapport a décrit Dimona comme un réacteur à des fins de recherche, et non pas pour la production du plutonium.
« Selon les documents, citant un officier supérieur de la CIA, les exigences de base de renseignement n’avaient pas été respectée. Et des incohérences entre les résultats de la première et de la deuxième visite étaient flagrantes. »
Le site Web des Archives de la sécurité nationale des Etats-Unis contient d’autres documents américains sur le programme nucléaire d’Israël. On peut apprendre aussi l’arrière-plan pour la réunion 1969 entre le président Richard Nixon et le Premier ministre Golda Meir, où la doctrine de l’ambiguïté est né comme une politique binationale.
« En dépit de la politique d’ambiguïté officielle des gouvernements israéliens, ce qui signifie qu’aucune information factuelle sur Dimona n’est jamais divulgué, il y a des informations historiques abondantes sur Dimona et l’histoire du programme nucléaire d’Israël – l’un des projets les plus étudiés dans les études universitaires sur les programmes nucléaires », Cohen dit.
Source : Haaretz
Declassified: How Israel Misled the U.S. About Its Nuclear Program
Ben-Gurion’s mumbling to Kennedy helped delay the Americans’ assessment that Jerusalem was on the verge of building a bomb.
Ofer Aderet for HAARETZ
Apr 21, 2016 6:38 PM
Fifty U.S. documents from the early 1960s were declassified by the U.S. National Security Archive on Thursday, shedding light on Israel’s attempts to hide one of its best-kept secrets to this day: details on its nuclear program. The Americans ultimately believed the Israelis were providing “untruthful cover” about intentions to build a bomb.
The documents include papers from the White House, the State Department, the Atomic Energy Commission and U.S. intelligence agencies. The editors are Avner Cohen, a professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, and William Burr, the head of nuclear affairs documentation at the National Security Archive, which is based at George Washington University in the capital.
One document provides the minutes of a meeting between U.S. President John F. Kennedy and Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion on May 30,1961, at the Waldorf Astoria in New York.
Cohen and Burr call that meeting a “nuclear conference” – Israel’s nuclear program greatly concerned Kennedy. When he met his predecessor Dwight D. Eisenhower before the changeover of January 20, 1961, he was quick to ask which countries Ike believed were determined to obtain nuclear weapons.
Secretary of State Christian Herter replied: “India and Israel,” before recommending that Kennedy pressure Israel into agreeing to have its nuclear facilities inspected.
According to the details of that meeting, already published in the past, Ben-Gurion told Kennedy that Israel’s Dimona project was peaceful. The American transcript says: “Our main – and for the time being only – purpose is [cheap energy]. We do not know what will happen in the future.”
The Israeli transcript says: “For the time being, the only purposes are for peace … but we will see what happens in the Middle East. It does not depend on us.”
In the newly released minutes, the Americans said “Ben-Gurion spoke rapidly and in a low voice so that some words were missed.” Kennedy had a hard time asking concrete questions.
“Ben-Gurion mumbled and spoke very softly. It was hard to hear him and understand what he was saying, partly due to his accent,” Cohen, author of “Israel and the Bomb, » told Haaretz.
“It seemed he was leaving in certain ambiguities, consciously or otherwise, so it couldn’t be said he totally lied to the president. As a result, the president couldn’t ask for clarifications, as noted in the minutes. We only discovered this now, with the declassification of the minutes.”
The minutes also reveal that the person taking notes, Assistant Secretary of State Phillips Talbot, thought he heard Ben-Gurion mention a “pilot plant for plutonium separation, which is needed for atomic power.” Talbot also heard Ben-Gurion say this might happen “three or four years later.” He understood the prime minister as saying Israel had no intention to develop nuclear weapons for the time being.
“Ben-Gurion, in what he said and in what he didn’t, was hinting that the nuclear reactor in Dimona could have military potential in the distant future, or at least that is what Talbot believed he heard,” write Cohen and Burr in their explanatory notes to the documents.
Much more plutonium than was known
Ten days before that meeting, another key meeting took place. This was the first visit by American inspectors (as the Americans called them – Israel called them visitors) at the Dimona reactor. The Israelis considered the visit productive. The inspectors believed the facility was under construction and consistent with the Israelis’ description: a research reactor for peaceful purposes.
The complete report on the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission’s visit is part of the new batch of declassified documents. According to the report, people at Dimona told the Americans that the reactor’s output would probably be doubled in the near future.
“This could have served as a warning signal and a worrying indicator that the reactor was capable of producing much more plutonium than was known at the time,” Cohen and Burr say in the explanatory notes. In fact, the visitors returned home satisfied, and their positive report paved the way for the Kennedy-Ben-Gurion meeting.
Another interesting document is the CIA’s National Intelligence Estimate on Israel crafted in October 1961, a few months after the Kennedy-Ben-Gurion meeting. This is the only declassified document published without deletions. It was released a year ago but overlooked by researchers.
“There are some very interesting lines there showing what the U.S. intelligence community really thought about Dimona,” Cohen says.
The document reveals that at the end of 1961, Washington believed that the reactor’s unambiguous purpose was to create an infrastructure for nuclear weapons.
“The Israelis intend at least to put themselves in the position of being able to produce nuclear weapons fairly soon after a decision to do so,” the Americans said. They expected the Israelis to have enough nuclear material for two bombs by 1965 or 1966.
“The significance of this is that the Americans knew that Ben-Gurion was misleading them,” Cohen says. “They couldn’t or wouldn’t directly accuse him of lying. Maybe they didn’t want to disclose what they knew. It’s clear the intelligence community knew that what Ben-Gurion said and what the inspectors saw in Dimona were far from being the whole truth.”
According to the explanatory notes: “The bottom line is that in 1961 the CIA already knew or understood that the way Israel referred to Dimona, whether through Ben-Gurion or through its scientists, was an untruthful cover.”
Along with Ben-Gurion’s silences and fuzzy details, the documents show that the Americans wondered whether the Israelis were deliberately trying to deceive them; for example, during a second visit to the reactor in September 1962.
One document, dated December 27, 1962, wonders about Israel’s unconventional hospitality. Inspectors arrived at the Nahal Soreq reactor for a routine visit in September. The scientific director there was Yuval Ne’eman, later president of Tel Aviv University and science minister for Menachem Begin.
The runaround, Israel-style
The Americans had pressured Israel to allow a second visit to Dimona, Cohen says.
The documents show that Ne’eman decided to take his guests to the Dead Sea. On the way back, as they were passing the Dimona facility, he suggested an unplanned visit.
According to the documents, Ne’eman said he could organize a talk with the facility’s director, and the two inspectors agreed. But it turned out the director wasn’t there, so senior engineers organized a 40-minute tour, much shorter than what was called for by protocol.
Following the tour, the Israelis suggested that the Americans return the following day, but the Americans wondered whether this was a diversion. After all, the Israelis knew the Americans were due to fly home the next day. The next available flight was four days later.
The documents show that the inspectors were puzzled, not knowing whether their visit was part of the inspection or whether they were only day trippers. Either way, the visit was incomplete and did not include visits to all buildings and inspections of all installations.
Ultimately, Israel got what it wanted. The inspectors were duly impressed and their report described Dimona as a reactor for research purposes, not for plutonium production.
Still, CIA officials who later discussed the visit cast doubt on the genuineness of the rapid-fire visit. “They were very uncomfortable with it. It seemed like a trick to them,” Cohen said.
“The documents show that a senior CIA officer said basic intelligence requirements had not been fulfilled and there were inconsistencies between the results of the first and second visits in terms of the use attributed to some of the equipment.”
The documents also show that Washington wanted to impose security surveillance on Prof. Israel Dostrovsky, a guest researcher in the United States at the time. Dostrovsky was a founder of Israel’s nuclear program and later the first head of the Israel Atomic Energy Commission, as well as the president of the Weizmann Institute of Science and a 1995 Israel Prize winner.
In 1961, the State Department asked the relevant agencies to keep an eye on Dostrovsky while he was working at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island. This was seen as a preventive measure designed to protect U.S. nuclear expertise. Dostrovsky died in 2010.
The U.S. National Security Archive’s website contains other U.S. documents on Israel’s nuclear program. One can learn there about the background for the 1969 meeting between President Richard Nixon and Prime Minister Golda Meir, where the ambiguity doctrine was born as a binational policy.
“Despite the official ambiguity policy of Israeli governments, meaning that no factual information about Dimona is ever divulged, there’s abundant historical information on Dimona and the history of Israel’s nuclear program – one of the most studied projects in academic studies on nuclear programs,” Cohen says.
Ofer Aderet
Haaretz Correspondent
Haaretz Report: US Officials Knew Israel Was Lying About Its Nuclear Program [ Ed. note – John F. Kennedy as well as officials in the CIA knew or had a strong suspicion that Israel was lying about its nuclear operation at Dimona. The report below refers to documents that have come to light providing insight into the extent to which Israeli officials went to conceal their nuclear bomb program. This includes a tactic used by David Gurion of deliberately speaking in a thick accent and a barely audible tone of voice during a meeting when Kennedy confronted him on the issue. Of all the different forces that have been implicated in the JFK assassination, which do you suppose had the greatest motive for wanting to see him dead? Looks like Michael Collins Piper may have been right. ]
Newly Declassified Documents Reveal Kennedy Administration’s Concerns Over Israel’s Nuclear Program
Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey
April 22, 2016
Newly declassified documents reveal that President John F. Kennedy and his senior aides were deeply concerned in 1961-62 about the nuclear proliferation risks represented by Israel’s nascent nuclear program. A large April 21 document release was co-sponsored by the National Security Archive, the Nuclear Proliferation International History Project, and the Middlebury Institute’s James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, and edited by Institute professor Avner Cohen and William Burr of the National Security Archive.
The released documents include records and notes from a May 1961 meeting between Kennedy and Ben-Gurion in Manhattan. During the meeting, Ben-Gurion “emphasized the peaceful, economic development-oriented nature of the Israeli nuclear project” while also slipping in mention of a “pilot” plant to process plutonium for “atomic power.” He was also quoted as saying that “there is no intention to develop weapons capacity now.”
Whatever Ben-Gurion actually said, neither President Kennedy nor U.S. intelligence officials were fully convinced by Israel’s insistence that Dimona was strictly a peaceful project. A recently declassified National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Israel prepared several months after that meeting, and published now for the first time, concluded that “Israel may have decided to undertake a nuclear weapons program. At a minimum, we believe it has decided to develop its nuclear facilities in such a way as to put it into a position to develop nuclear weapons promptly should it decide to do so.”
“The significance of this NIE is that the Americans knew or at least recognized that Ben-Gurion was misleading them,” Cohen says. “They couldn’t or wouldn’t directly accuse him of lying. Maybe they didn’t want to disclose what they knew. But it’s clear that the intelligence community understood that what Ben-Gurion said and what the inspectors saw at Dimona were far from being the entire truth.”
Cohen and Burr’s overview of the released documents “reveal that more than any other American president, John F. Kennedy was personally engaged with the problem of Israel’s nuclear program; he may also have been more concerned about it than any of his successors. Of all U.S. leaders in the nuclear age, Kennedy was the nonproliferation president… Kennedy came to office with the conviction that the spread of nuclear weapons would make the world a much more dangerous place.”
Israel’s oldest daily newspaper Haaretz gave the document release prominent coverage (subscription required).
Professor Avner Cohen is also a senior fellow with the Institute’s James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, the largest nongovernmental organization in the United States devoted exclusively to research and training on nonproliferation issues.
How the Israelis Hoodwinked JFK on Going Nuclear
Newly declassified documents reveal how David Ben-Gurion’s mumbles and a trick sightseeing tour helped Israeli officials pull the wool over Washington’s eyes on the real purpose of the Dimona reactor.
By Avner Cohen, William Burr
April 26, 2016
In October 1961, the CIA issued a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Israel, the first since the discovery of the Dimona reactor less than a year earlier, in which the CIA’s analysts assessed broadly the rationale and character of the Israeli nuclear program. For nearly 55 years it was kept secret, until it was quietly declassified in its entirety last year. It sheds light on what the U.S. intelligence community thought about the Israeli nuclear project in the first year of the Kennedy administration, while the Dimona reactor was still under construction. The CIA judgment was straightforward and unequivocal: Israel was placing itself in a position to “produce sufficient weapons-grade plutonium for one or two crude weapons a year by 1965-66, provided separation facilities with a capacity larger than that of the pilot plant now under construction are available.” At a minimum, U.S. intelligence knew that the Dimona project was about weapons capability, not about energy, electricity, or development — as the Israelis had tried to spin the ongoing project.
The declassified NIE also sheds light, by implication, on what American decision-makers, including President John F. Kennedy, must have thought about what Israeli leaders and top Israeli government officials had told them about the Dimona project. For example, this NIE makes apparent that Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion lied to, or at least misled, Kennedy during a private conversation with him just three months earlier. It also reveals that what top Israeli officials at Dimona had told visiting U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) scientists must have been false. Simply put, the CIA knew, or at least believed, that Israel was not telling the U.S. government the truth about Dimona — that the nuclear reactor was intended to develop a weapons capability.
This NIE, as well as other related documents, many of them never seen by scholars, from the first two years of the Kennedy administration, were published on April 21 by the National Security Archive, in collaboration with the Nuclear Proliferation International History Project and the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies. The collection highlights both the complexity and the gravity of the Israeli nuclear program for Kennedy and his administration.
The declassified record reveals that more than any other U.S. president, Kennedy was more personally engaged with Israel’s nuclear program and more concerned about it than any of his successors. Israel was the first case of nuclear proliferation that he had to deal with as a president. And nuclear proliferation was JFK’s “private nightmare,” as Glenn Seaborg, his Atomic Energy Commission chairman, once noted. And more than any other country, Israel was the one that impressed upon Kennedy the complexity and difficulty of the problem of nuclear proliferation.
Worried that a nuclear-armed Israel would destabilize the Middle East, Kennedy wanted to bring his concerns directly to Ben-Gurion. The two leaders met to discuss the nuclear issue at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York on May 30, 1961. The meeting was possible thanks to a reassuring report about the first American visit at Dimona, by AEC scientists, 10 days earlier.
The documentation about the Waldorf Astoria meeting is interesting because it includes both the U.S. and Israeli official memoranda of conversations as well as a U.S. draft memorandum, which was previously unknown. Each has interesting differences. The U.S. official memorandum of the conversation, declassified and published in the 1990s, was prepared by Philips Talbot, assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs (and approved — possibly corrected — by White House Deputy Special Counsel Mike Feldman). The Israeli minutes, prepared by Ambassador Avraham Harman, were also declassified in the 1990s and historians have made extensive use of them.
In the Waldorf Astoria meeting, Ben-Gurion provided Kennedy with a rationale and narrative of the Dimona project that was very similar to what the Israeli hosts provided to the AEC visitors to Dimona (albeit non-technical and more political): Namely, that the Dimona project was peaceful in nature; it was about energy and development. However, unlike during the Dimona visit, Ben-Gurion’s narrative and rationale left a little wiggle room for a future reversal. The Israeli transcript makes Ben-Gurion’s caveat pronounced: “For the time being, the only purposes are for peace. … But we will see what will happen in the Middle East. It does not depend on us.” The American transcript, by way of rephrasing Ben-Gurion, reveals a similar caveat as well: “‘Our main — and for the time being — only purpose is this [cheap energy, etc.],’” the prime minister said, adding: “‘We do not know what will happen in the future.’ … Furthermore, commenting on the political and strategic implications of atomic power and weaponry, the prime minister said he does believe that ‘in 10 or 15 years the Egyptian presumably could achieve it themselves.’”
In his draft record, Talbot noted (in parenthesis) that during that part of the conversation, Ben-Gurion spoke “rapidly and in a low voice” in a way that “some words were missed.” Nevertheless, Talbot thought he had heard Ben-Gurion referring to a “pilot plant for plutonium separation which is needed for atomic power,” but that might happen “three or four years later” and that “there is no intention to develop weapons capacity now.” Ben-Gurion was giving himself a lot of wiggle room, if Talbot heard him correctly. The draft was declassified long ago but was buried in obscurity; it needs to be taken into account by scholars.
Days after the meeting, Talbot sat with Feldman at the White House to “check fine points” about “sidelines of interest.” A key issue was plutonium, about which Ben-Gurion “mumbled quickly in a low voice.” Ben-Gurion was understood to say something to the effect that the issue of plutonium would not arise until the Dimona installation would be complete in 1964 or so, and that only then would Israel decide what to do about the processing of plutonium. But that appeared to be incompatible with what Ben-Gurion had said to then-U.S. Ambassador to Israel Ogden Reid in January 1961, namely, that the spent fuel would return to the country that had provided the reactor uranium in the first place — France. But the U.S.-Israeli affairs desk officer, William R. Crawford, who looked further into the record, suggested that what Ben-Gurion had said to Reid was even more equivocal and evasive. Upon close examination, Ben-Gurion might have meant to hint that Israel was preserving Israel’s freedom of action to produce plutonium for its own purposes. Kennedy may not have picked up this point, but then again he, like Talbot, may not have been sure exactly what Ben-Gurion had said.
The Ben-Gurion-Kennedy nuclear summit helped clear the air a bit, but the wary view embodied in the NIE shaped U.S. perceptions of the Dimona project. The Kennedy administration held to its conviction that it was necessary to monitor Dimona, not only to resolve American concerns about nuclear proliferation but also to calm regional anxieties about an Israeli nuclear threat. By mid-1962 the Kennedy administration believed that a second visit by U.S. scientists was necessary and, toward that end, started to put diplomatic pressure on Israel.
On Sept. 26, 1962, after “repeated requests over several months,” a second U.S. visit to Dimona finally took place. Until recently, little was publicly known about that visit except that then-U.S. Ambassador to Israel Walworth Barbour referred to it as “unduly restricted to no more than 45 minutes.” According to professor Yuval Ne’eman, at the time the scientific director of the Soreq nuclear research center and the host of the American AEC visitors, this short, deceptive visit was a deliberate “trick” he devised and executed to reduce U.S. pressure.
Ne’eman told us a great deal about this 1962 visit years ago, but asked not to cite it while he was alive. Now, exactly 10 years after his death on April 26, 2006, with the declassification of U.S. documents, it is time to tell his story. According to Ne’eman, as the host of the two AEC scientists who had arrived to inspect the Soreq reactor (under the terms of Atoms for Peace program) he arranged to take them for a tour of the Dead Sea. This sightseeing, however, was a well-planned pretext to bring them to Dimona — on Israeli terms. So, on their way back to Tel Aviv, as they were passing near the Dimona reactor, Ne’eman “spontaneously” suggested to arrange a quick visit at Dimona to say hello to the director. The purpose was, of course, to have a much shorter, more informal, visit than the U.S. government had been pressing for. In doing so, Israel planned to convince the visitors that Dimona was a research reactor, not a production reactor. And, of course, when the United States continued to press for a visit at Dimona, Ne’eman’s plan was to tell them, “But you’ve already been there.”
A declassified document in the U.S. archives corroborates Ne’eman’s account of the second visit. According to a memorandum written in late 1962 by Rodger Davies, deputy director of the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, the whole visit had been improvised. The two AEC scientists, Thomas Haycock and Ulysses Staebler, were officially in Israel to inspect the U.S.-supplied “Atoms for Peace” reactor at Soreq. But on their way back from a tour of the Dead Sea, their Israeli host (the U.S. document does not mention Ne’eman by name) observed that they were passing by the Dimona reactor and he offered to “arrange a call with the director.” It turned out that the director was not there, but the chief engineers gave them a 40-minute tour of the reactor.
Davies later wrote that the visit made the AEC scientists feel a little awkward, “not certain whether they were [there as] guests of their scientist host or on an inspection.” They did not see the complete installation, nor did they enter all the buildings they saw, but they believed that what they saw confirmed that Dimona was a research reactor, not a production reactor; that, from their point of view, made the visit “satisfactory.” The Israelis cunningly offered the AEC the option to come back to the site to complete the visit the next morning, but because that would have forced a four-day layover Haycock and Staebler declined the invitation.
Davies wrote Talbot that the unconventional nature of the visit stirred suspicion within the relevant intelligence offices in Washington. At least one interagency meeting convened to discuss the visit’s intelligence value. The CIA’s “director of Intelligence,” probably a reference to Deputy Director of Intelligence Ray Cline, was cited to say that while “the immediate objectives of the visit may have been satisfied, certain basic intelligence requirements were not.” It was also observed that “there were certain inconsistencies between the first and second inspection reports insofar as the usages attributed to some equipment were concerned.” According to Davies, the fact that the inspectors were invited to visit again the next day seemed to indicate that “there was no deliberate ‘hanky-panky’ involved on the part of the Israeli,” but the fact that such a return visit would have caused a major delay in the team’s departure made the Israeli offer impractical and perhaps disingenuous.
Whatever the doubts about the intelligence value, the State Department used the visits’ conclusions to assure interested governments that Dimona was peaceful. A few weeks after the visit, as the Cuban Missile Crisis was unfolding, the State Department began to quietly inform selected governments about its positive results. U.S. diplomats told Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, during a briefing on the Cuban situation, that the recent visit confirmed Israeli statements about the reactor. The British and Canadians were also told similar things about the “recent brief visit” to Dimona, without explaining what had made it so short.
The ambiguities of the second visit and the knowledge that the Dimona reactor would be an operating reactor in 1963-1964 guaranteed that the issue and the need for thorough inspections would remain on the Kennedy administration’s agenda. For Kennedy, U.S. relations with Israel could be in jeopardy if an acceptable solution to the Dimona problem was not reached. The next stage of the drama — indeed, the most intense part of it — would come in 1963, when Kennedy sent ultimatums to Israel and diplomatic conflict turned into a secret showdown. However, his first two years in office demonstrated that his determination to prevent an Israeli nuclear weapons program was central to his efforts to avoid nuclear proliferation.
LES DOCUMENTS : PRÉSENTATION
The National Security Archives
The George Washington University
|||||||The Nuclear Vault:
Resources from the
National Security Archive’s
Nuclear Documentation Project
Concerned About Nuclear Weapons Potential, John F. Kennedy Pushed for Inspection of Israel Nuclear Facilities
Atomic Energy Commission Inspectors Gave Dimona a Clean Bill of Health – Twice – after Deliberately Truncated Tours, but U.S. Intelligence Remained Suspicious
International Atomic Energy Agency Inspection of Dimona Was “Our Objective,” According to State Department
National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 547
Posted – April 21, 2016
Avner Cohen and William Burr, editors
For more information contact:
Avner Cohen at 202-489-6282 (mobile), 831-647-6437 (office) or avnerc@miis.edu
William Burr at 202/994-7000 or nsarchiv@gwu.edu.
Kennedy, Dimona and the Nuclear Proliferation Problem: 1961-1962
by Avner Cohen and William Burr
Washington, D.C., April 21, 2016 – President John F. Kennedy worried that Israel’s nuclear program was a potentially serious proliferation risk and insisted that Israel permit periodic inspections to mitigate the danger, according to declassified documents published today by the National Security Archive, Nuclear Proliferation International History Project, and the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies. Kennedy pressured the government of Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion to prevent a military nuclear program, particularly after stage-managed tours of the Dimona facility for U.S. government scientists in 1961 and 1962 raised suspicions within U.S. intelligence that Israel might be concealing its underlying nuclear aims. Kennedy’s long-run objective, documents show, was to broaden and institutionalize inspections of Dimona by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
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John F. Kennedy was a member of Congress when he first met Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion in 1951. In this photograph taken at Ben-Gurion’s home, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr., then a member of Congress from New York, sat between them. (Image from Geopolitiek in Perspectief) |
On 30 May 1961, Kennedy met Ben-Gurion in Manhattan to discuss the bilateral relationship and Middle East issues. However, a central (and indeed the first) issue in their meeting was the Israeli nuclear program, about which President Kennedy was most concerned. According to a draft record of their discussion, which has never been cited, and is published here for the first time, Ben-Gurion spoke “rapidly and in a low voice” and “some words were missed.” He emphasized the peaceful, economic development-oriented nature of the Israeli nuclear project. Nevertheless the note taker, Assistant Secretary of State Philips Talbot, believed that he heard Ben-Gurion mention a “pilot” plant to process plutonium for “atomic power” and also say that “there is no intention to develop weapons capacity now.” Ben-Gurion tacitly acknowledged that the Dimona reactor had a military potential, or so Talbot believed he had heard. The final U.S. version of the memcon retained the sentence about plutonium but did not include the language about a “pilot” plant and “weapons capacity.”
The differences between the two versions suggest the difficulty of preparing accurate records of meetings. But whatever Ben-Gurion actually said, President Kennedy was never wholly satisfied with the insistence that Dimona was strictly a peaceful project. Neither were U.S. intelligence professionals. A recently declassified National Intelligence Estimate on Israel prepared several months after the meeting, and published here for the first time, concluded that “Israel may have decided to undertake a nuclear weapons program. At a minimum, we believe it has decided to develop its nuclear facilities in such a way as to put it into a position to develop nuclear weapons promptly should it decide to do so.” This is the only NIE where the discussion of Dimona has been declassified in its entirety.
Declassified documents reveal that more than any other American president, John F. Kennedy was personally engaged with the problem of Israel’s nuclear program; he may also have been more concerned about it than any of his successors. Of all U.S. leaders in the nuclear age, Kennedy was the nonproliferation president. Nuclear proliferation was his “private nightmare,” as Glenn Seaborg, his Atomic Energy Commission chairman, once noted. Kennedy came to office with the conviction that the spread of nuclear weapons would make the world a much more dangerous place; he saw proliferation as the path to a global nuclear war. This concern shaped his outlook on the Cold War even before the 1960 presidential campaign – by then he had already opposed the resumption of nuclear testing largely due to proliferation concerns – and his experience in office, especially the Cuban Missile Crisis, solidified it further.
This Electronic Briefing Book (EBB) is the first of two publications which address the subject of JFK, his administration, and the Israeli nuclear program. It includes about thirty documents produced by the State Department, the Atomic Energy Commission, and intelligence agencies, some of which highlight the president’s strong personal interest and direct role in moving nonproliferation policy forward during the administration’s first two years. Some of the documents have been only recently declassified, while others were located in archival collections; most are published here for the first time. The compilation begins with President Kennedy’s meeting with departing ambassador to Israel Odgen Reid on January 31, 1961, days after Kennedy took office, and concludes with the State Department’s internal review in late 1962 of the of the second U.S. visit in Dimona.
The documents published today also include:
- The Atomic Energy Commission’s recently declassified report on the first official U.S. visit to the Dimona complex, in May 1961. The Ben-Gurion-Kennedy meeting was possible only after that visit produced a positive report on the peaceful, nonmilitary purposes of the reactor. According to the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), Dimona “was conceived as a means for gaining experience in construction of a nuclear facility which would prepare them for nuclear power in the long run.”
- A letter from the State Department to the AEC asking it to place prominent Israeli nuclear scientist Dr. Israel Dostrovsky of the Weizman Institute, who was a visiting researcher at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, under “discreet surveillance” as a “precautionary step” to safeguard U.S. nuclear know-how. The document notes Dostrovsky’s reputation as one of the individuals “primarily responsible for guiding Israel’s atomic energy program.” In 1966 Dostrovsky was appointed by Prime Minister Levi Eshkol as director-general of Israel’s Atomic Energy Commission, which he reorganized and gave new impetus.
- Recently declassified records of U.S.-U.K. meetings during 1962 to discuss the possibilities of putting pressure on Israel to accept inspections of Dimona by the International Atomic Energy Agency. While State Department officials did not believe that pressure would work, they agreed that “IAEA controls should be our objective.” In the meantime, “interim ad hoc inspections” were necessary to satisfy ourselves and the world-at-large as to Israel’s intentions.”
- An assessment of the second AEC visit to the Dimona site in September 1962. After weeks of diplomatic pressure by the Kennedy administration for a second visit, two AEC scientists who had inspected the U.S.-supplied Soreq reactor were “spontaneously” invited for a [tk: Bill, 40 or 45 minutes? All other references are to 40.] 45-minute tour to Dimona, while on their way back from an excursion to the Dead Sea. They had no time to see the complete installation, but they left the site with the impression that Dimona was a research reactor, not a production reactor. CIA and State Department officials were skeptical about the circumstances, unable to determine whether the spontaneous invitation was a treat or a trick.
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President-elect John F. Kennedy and Secretary of State-designate Dean Rusk Meet with President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Secretary of State Christian Herter, 19 January 1961. At this meeting Herter warned Kennedy about the Israeli nuclear problem (Photograph AR6279-D, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library) |
More than any other country, it was Israel which most impressed upon President Kennedy the complexity of nuclear proliferation. Israel was the first case with which he had to struggle as president. Only weeks before his inauguration, the outgoing Eisenhower administration quietly discovered and confirmed the secret reactor at Dimona. In mid-December the news leaked out while the Eisenhower administration was pondering a Special National Intelligence Estimate, which asserted that, on the basis of the available evidence “plutonium production for weapons is at least one major purpose of this effort. » According to the estimate, if it was widely believed that Israel was acquiring a nuclear weapons capability it would cause “consternation” in the Arab world, with blame going to the U.S. and France for facilitating the project. The United Arab Republic (Egypt/Syria) would “feel the most threatened,” might approach the Soviets for more “countervailing military aid and political backing,” and the Arab world in general might be prompted to take “concrete actions” against Western interests in the region. Moreover, Israel’s “initiative might remove some of the inhibitions to development of nuclear weapons in other Free World countries.”
On January 19, 1961, on the eve of his inauguration, President-elect Kennedy visited the White House – for the last time as a guest – along with his senior team. After 45 minutes of one-on-one conversation with President Eisenhower, the two men walked to the Cabinet Room to join their departing and incoming secretaries of state, defense and treasury to discuss the transition. One of Kennedy’s first questions was about the countries which were most determined to seek the bomb. “Israel and India,” Secretary of State Christian Herter fired back, and added that the newly discovered Dimona reactor, being constructed with aid from France, could be capable of generating 90 kilogram of weapons-grade plutonium by 1963. Herter urged the new president to press hard on inspection in the case of Israel before it introduced nuclear weapons into the Middle East.[1]
With his concern about stability in the Middle East and the broader nuclear proliferation threat, Kennedy took Herter’s advice seriously. Within days he met with departing Ambassador Reid for discussions of Dimona and other regional matters. To help him prepare for the meeting, new Secretary of State Dean Rusk provided an updated report about Israel’s nuclear activities and a detailed chronology of the discovery of Dimona. For the rest of Kennedy’s time in office, Dimona would remain an issue of special and personal concern to him and to his close advisers.
The most important event covered in this collection was the “nuclear summit” held at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York City on May 30, 1961, between Kennedy and Ben-Gurion. We refer to it as a nuclear summit because Dimona was at the heart of that meeting. The encounter was made possible thanks to a reassuring report about the first American visit to Dimona, which had taken place ten days earlier.
Kennedy had tirelessly pressured Ben-Gurion to allow the visit since taking office, insisting that meeting the request – made initially by the Eisenhower administration after the discovery of Dimona – was a condition for normalizing U.S.-Israeli relations. In a sense, Kennedy turned the question into a de facto ultimatum to Israel. For weeks Ben-Gurion dragged his feet, possibly even manufacturing or at least magnifying a domestic political dispute into a government resignation, primarily as a ploy to stall or delay that Dimona visit.
By April 1961, after a new government had been organized, Israeli Ambassador Avram Harman finally told the administration that Israel had agreed to an American tour of Dimona. On May 20, two AEC scientists, U. M. Staebler and J. W. Croach Jr., visited the nuclear facility on a carefully crafted tour. The visit began with a briefing by a Dimona senior management team, headed by Director-General Manes Pratt, who presented a technological rationale for, and historical narrative of, the project: the Dimona nuclear research center, the Americans were told, was “conceived as a means for gaining experience in construction of a nuclear facility which would prepare them [Israel] for nuclear power in the long run.” In essence, according to Pratt, this was a peaceful project. As the American team’s summary report, which was highlighted in a memorandum to National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, made very clear, the AEC team believed that the Israelis had told them the truth: the scientists were “satisfied that nothing was concealed from them and that the reactor is of the scope and peaceful character previously described to the United States by representatives of the Government of Israel.”
The AEC’s team’s official report (document 8A) is now available for the first time. Previously only draft notes written by the team’s leader had been accessible to researchers. The differences between the two versions are minor except for a noteworthy paragraph in the final report, under the headline “General comment.” That paragraph is important because it reveals that the Israeli hosts told the AEC team that the reactor’s power was likely to double in the future. “It is quite possible that after operating experience has been obtained the power level of the reactor can be increased by a factor of the order of two by certain modifications in design and relaxation of some operating conditions.” The AEC team could have seen that acknowledgement as a red flag, a worrisome indication that the reactor was capable of producing much more plutonium than was then acknowledged. But the team’s one-sentence response was benign: “Design conservatism of this order is understandable for a project of this type,” On the basis of such a positive report, the Waldorf Astoria meeting was able to go ahead.
The Kennedy-Ben-Gurion Meeting
This collection includes both American and Israeli transcripts of the Waldorf Astoria meeting. One of the transcripts is a previously unknown draft of the Kennedy-Ben-Gurion memcon, which has interesting differences with the final version. The U.S. official memorandum of conversation, declassified and published in the 1990s, was prepared by Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs Phillips Talbot (and approved – possibly corrected – by White House Deputy Special Counsel Myer “Mike” Feldman). The Israeli minutes, prepared by Ambassador Avraham Harman, were also declassified in the 1990s and historians have made extensive use of them.[2]
Ben-Gurion provided Kennedy with a rationale and narrative of the Dimona project that was very similar to what the Israeli hosts provided to the AEC team visiting Dimona (albeit in non-technical and more political terms): the Dimona project was peaceful in nature; it was about energy and development. However, unlike during the Dimona visit, Ben-Gurion’s narrative and rationale left a little wiggle room for a future reversal. The prime minister did that by qualifying his peaceful pledge and leaving room for a future change of heart. The Israeli transcript makes Ben-Gurion’s caveat pronounced: “for the time being, the only purposes are for peace. … But we will see what will happen in the Middle East. It does not depend on us” (italics added). The American transcript, by way of rephrasing Ben-Gurion, reveals a similar caveat as well: “Our main – and for the time being – only purpose is this [cheap energy, etc.],” the Prime Minister said, adding that “we do not know what will happen in the future” … Furthermore, commenting on the political and strategic implications of atomic power and weaponry, the Prime Minister said he does believe that “in ten or fifteen years the Egyptian presumably could achieve it themselves” (italics added).
In his draft minutes, Assistant Secretary Talbot notes (in parentheses) that during that part of the conversation, Ben-Gurion spoke “rapidly and in a low voice” so that “some words were missed.” Nevertheless, Talbot thought that he had heard Ben-Gurion making reference to a “pilot plant for plutonium separation which is needed for atomic power,” but that might happen “three or four years later” and that “there is no intention to develop weapons capacity now.” Talbot’s draft was declassified long ago but has been buried in obscurity; it needs to be taken into account by scholars. Notably, the Israeli transcript is even more straightforward in citing Ben-Gurion on the pilot plant issue: “after three or four years we shall have a pilot plant for separation which is needed anyway for a power reactor.”
Days after the meeting, Talbot sat with Feldman at the White House to “check fine points” about “side lines of interest.” There was the key issue of plutonium, about which Ben-Gurion mumbled quickly in a low voice. Ben-Gurion was understood to say something to the effect that the issue of plutonium would not arise until the installation was complete in 1964 or so, and only then could Israel decide what to do about processing it. But this appeared to be incompatible with what the prime minister had said to Ambassador Reid in Tel Aviv in January 1961, namely that the spent fuel would return to the country which provided the uranium in the first place (France). But Israeli affairs desk officer, William R. Crawford, who looked further into the record, suggested that what Ben-Gurion had said was more equivocal and evasive. Upon close examination, Ben-Gurion might have meant to hint in passing that Israel was preserving its freedom of action to produce plutonium for its own purposes. Kennedy may not have picked up on this point, but he, like Talbot, may not have been sure exactly what Ben-Gurion had said.
The most intriguing – and novel – document in this collection is National Intelligence Estimate 35-61 (document #11a), under the headline “Outlook on Israel,” which was declassified only in February 2015. This NIE left no doubt that the AEC scientists’ impressions from their visit to Dimona had no impact on the way which the intelligence community made its own determination on Dimona’s overall purpose. While the visit clearly helped to ease the political and diplomatic tensions between the United States and Israel over Dimona, and removed, at least temporarily, the nuclear issue as a problem from the bilateral agenda, it did not change the opinion of U.S. intelligence professionals. In their view, while acknowledging the Israeli official narrative of Dimona as peaceful, it was truly about weapons capability. The Dimona complex provided Israel with the experience and resources “to develop a plutonium production capability.” NIE 35-61 reminded its readers that France had supplied “plans, material, equipment and technical assistance to the Israelis.”
Significantly, the intelligence community estimated in 1961 that Israel would be in a position to “produce sufficient weapons grade plutonium for one or two crude weapons a year by 1965-66, provided separation facilities with a capacity larger than that of the pilot plant now under construction are available.” In retrospect, in all these respects, NIE 35-61 was accurate in its assessments and predictions, although no one on the U.S. side knew for sure when Israel would possess the requisite reprocessing facilities. The language about “separation facilities” raises important questions. If Israel was to produce nuclear weapons it would require technology to reprocess spent fuel into plutonium. Whether and when U.S. intelligence knew that Israel had begun work on a secret, dedicated separation plant – larger than a pilot plant – at the Dimona complex has yet to be disclosed. But if the CIA knew about such plans, it may have meant that key information was concealed from AEC scientists who visited Dimona (or perhaps they were instructed to locate such facilities).[3]
Probably lacking secret knowledge of internal Israeli government thinking, the authors of NIE 35-61 may not have fully understood the depth of Israel’s nuclear resolve, or at least, the modus operandi by which Israel proceeded with its nuclear project. They could not be fully clear – both conceptually and factually – on the nature of the Israeli nuclear commitment, i.e., whether Dimona was a dedicated weapons program from the very start, or, alternatively, whether it was set up as infrastructure leading to a weapons capability upon a later decision. At a minimum, however, the authors of NIE 35-61 believed “that the Israelis intend at least to put themselves in the position of being able to produce nuclear weapons fairly soon after a decision to do so.”
Notwithstanding the lack of clarity, the NIE’s findings were incompatible with what Ben-Gurion told Kennedy about the overall purpose of the Dimona project as well as with what he said about Dimona’s plutonium production capacity. Similarly, the NIE was inconsistent with the AEC report whose writers accepted the Israeli narrative and rationale. The bottom line was that as early as 1961 the CIA already knew – or at least suspected – that the Israeli official account of the Dimona project – either by the prime minister or by Israeli scientists – was a cover story and deceptive by nature.
The Second Visit
The AEC visit and the Ben-Gurion Kennedy meeting helped clear the air a bit, but the wary view embodied in the NIE shaped U.S. perceptions of the Dimona project. The Kennedy administration held to its conviction that it was necessary to monitor Dimona, not only to resolve American concerns about nuclear proliferation but also to calm regional anxieties about an Israeli nuclear threat. In this context, the United States did not want to continue to be the only country that guaranteed the peaceful nature of Dimona to the Arab countries. Hence, during the months after the meetings, State Department officials tried to follow up President Kennedy’s interest in having scientists from “neutral” nations, such as Sweden, visit the Dimona plant. The British also favored such ideas but they sought U.S. pressure to induce the Israelis to accept inspection visits by the International Atomic Energy Agency. The Kennedy administration believed that IAEA inspections of Dimona were a valid long-term goal but recognized that a second visit by U.S. scientists was necessary if a visit by neutrals could not be arranged.
The talks with the Swedes did not pan out; by June 1962, the Kennedy administration decided to “undertake the responsibility once more.” On 26 September 1962, after “repeated requests over several months,” a second American visit to Dimona finally took place. Until recently little was known about that visit except that Ambassador Walworth Barbour referred to it as “unduly restricted to no more than forty five minutes.”[4] Also, the late professor Yuval Ne’eman, at the time serving as the scientific director of the Soreq nuclear research center and the official host of the American AEC visitors, was cited in Israel and the Bomb to the effect that the visit was a deliberate “trick” (the word “trick” was used but was not cited in the book) he devised and executed to ease American pressure for a second formal visit in Dimona.[5]
This collection includes archival material that sheds light on the second visit. The key document is a memo, written on 27 December 1962, by deputy director of the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs Rodger Davies to Assistant Secretary Talbot on the September visit. It was hiding in plain sight in a microfilm supplement to the State Department historical series, Foreign Relations of the United States. The memo narrated the improvised circumstances of the visit which fit well with the way Ne’eman told the story in the late 1990s. As the two AEC scientists who had arrived to inspect the small reactor at Soreq – Thomas Haycock and Ulysses Staebler – were being driven back from their Dead Sea tour, Ne’eman noted that they were passing by the Dimona reactor and that he could spontaneously “arrange a call with the director.” Notably, Staebler was among the two AEC scientists who had visited Dimona in May 1961, so he must have met director Pratt. It turned out that the director was not there, but the chief engineers gave them a 40-minute tour of the reactor.
The 27 December document reveals that the circumstances of that tour made the AEC visitors feel a little awkward, “not certain whether they were guests of their scientist-host or on an inspection.” They did not see the complete installation, nor did they enter all the buildings they saw, but they believed that what they saw confirmed that Dimona was a research reactor, not a production reactor; and that, from their point of view, made the visit worthwhile and “satisfactory.” The memo also notes that the AEC scientists were presented with the option to come back to the site to complete the visit the next morning, but because that would have forced a four-day layover they declined the offer.
According to Rodger Davies, the highly unconventional nature of the visit stirred suspicion within the relevant intelligence offices in Washington. During one interagency meeting to discuss the visit’s intelligence value, the CIA’s “Director of Intelligence,” probably a reference to Deputy Director of Intelligence Ray Cline, was quoted as saying that “the immediate objectives of the visit may have been satisfied, [but] certain basic intelligence requirements were not.” It was also observed that “there were certain inconsistencies between the first and second inspection reports insofar as the usages attributed to some equipment were concerned.” The fact that the inspectors were invited to visit again the next day seemed to indicate that “there was no deliberate ’hanky-panky’ involved on the part of the [ Israelis,” but the fact that such a return visit would have caused a major delay in the team’s departure flight made the Israeli offer impractical and perhaps disingenuous.
Whatever the doubts about the intelligence value, the State Department deployed the visits’ conclusions to assure interested countries that Dimona was peaceful. A few weeks afterwards, just as the Cuban Missile Crisis was unfolding, the State Department began to quietly inform selected governments about its positive results. U.S. diplomats told Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, during a briefing on the Cuban situation, that the recent visit confirmed Israeli statements about the reactor. The British and Canadians were also told similar things about the “recent brief visit” to Dimona, without explaining what had made it so short. By the end of October, the Department had sent a fuller statement to various embassies.
Davies’ memorandum cites a formal report, dated October 12, 1962, prepared by the AEC team about their visit. But the report was not attached to the memorandum found in State Department files. Unfortunately, except for the 1961 visit report, the Department of Energy has been unable to locate the 1962 report or other such reports from the following years.
Documents 1A-B: Briefing President Kennedy
Document 1A: Secretary of State Rusk to President Kennedy, “Your Appointment with Ogden R. Reid, Recently Ambassador to Israel,” 30 January 1961, with memorandum and chronology attached, Secret, Excised copy
Document 2A-E: Pressing for a Visit
Document 2A: Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs to Secretary of State, “President’s Suggestion re Israeli Reactor,” 2 February 1961, Secret
Documents 3A-F: Raising Pressure for an Invitation
Documents 4A-B: The Invitation
Documents 5A-F: Arrangements for the Visit
Document 6: A Private Debate
Document 7: President Kennedy’s Concerns
Documents 8A-B: The Visit to Dimona
Documents 9A-D: Kennedy’s Meeting with Ben–Gurion
Documents 10A-C: Sharing the Findings
Documents 11A-B: Lingering Suspicions
Documents 12A-B: Exploring Visits by a “Neutral” Scientist
Document 13: Memorandum by Robert Amory, Deputy Director of Intelligence, Central Intelligence Agency, to Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs [McGeorge Bundy], 18 January 1962, Secret, excised copy
Documents 14A-D: Whether the IAEA Could Be Brought In
Documents 15A-E: Trying to Arrange a Second Visit
Documents 16A-B: The Second Visit
Document 16A: A: State Department telegram 451 to U.S. Embassy Egypt, 22 October 1962, Secret
Document 16B: Memorandum of Conversation, “Second U.S. Visit to Dimona Reactor,” 23 October 1962, Secret
Document 16C: Rodger P. Davies to Phillips Talbot, “Second Inspection of Israel’s Dimona Reactor,” 27 December 1962, Secret
A: RG 59, DF, 884A.1901/10-2262; B: RG 59, DF, 884A.1901/10-2362; C: U.S. Department of State, Microfiche Supplement, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961-1963, Volumes XVII, XVIII, XX, XXI (Microfiche Number 10, Document Number 150)
NOTES
Op-Ed: Netanyahu is not the first leader the White House found « frustrating » There is no friendship without disagreements and there have been plenty of those in Israel’s history of relations with the USA. (…)Ironically, many of the Israeli leaders with whom past U.S. presidents have clashed were from the leftwing Labor Party, not the rightwing Likud. Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, was the first Israeli leader to find himself at odds with Washington.(…)President John F. Kennedy, for his part, was frustrated by Ben-Gurion’s refusal to acknowledge that Israel was developing nuclear weapons. Meeting in New York City in May 1961, JFK pressed the Israeli leader for details on what was taking place at the Dimona nuclear research facility. « Ben-Gurion mumbled and spoke very softly; it was hard to hear him and understand what he was saying, partly due to his accent, » according to Prof. Avner Cohen, author of Israel and the Bomb. Recently-declassified National Security Archive documents show that U.S. inspectors who were given a partial tour of the Dimona facility in 1962 felt they were being « tricked » and « misled » because they were shown only some of the buildings.
50 ans après l’assassinat de JFK, un livre de référence vient de paraître colligeant et examinant sa correspondance: The Letters of John F. Kennedy. L’éditeur Martin W. Sandler reconnaît que la thèse de l’implication centrale d’Israël dans l’assassinat, thèse développée par Michael Collins Piper dans Final Judgment, est « des plus intrigantes »! Final Judgment est le seul et unique ouvrage conspirationniste mentionné dans cet ouvrage de référence de plus de 400 pages. L’auteur ne peut être suspecté d’antisémitisme ou encore de biais contre Israël: c’est un historien juif respecté et la maison d’édition qui distribue son livre est l’une des plus prestigieuses maison d’édition. Il écrit en page 333:
In March 1992, Representative Paul Findley of Illinois, wrote in the Washington Report on Middle Eastern Affairs, “It is interesting. . . . to notice that in all the words written and uttered about the Kennedy assassination, Israel’s intelligence agency, the Mossad, has never been mentioned.” Two years later in his book Final Judgment, author Michael Collins Piper actually accused Israel of the crime. Of all the conspiracy theories, it remains one of the most intriguing.
What is indisputable is that, although it was kept out of the eye of both the Press and the Public, a bitter dispute had developped between Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion who believed that his nation’s survival depended on it attaining nuclear capability and Kennedy who was vehemently opposed to it. In May 1963, Kennedy wrote to Ben-Gurion explaining why he was convinced that Israel’s pursuit of nuclear weapons capability was a serious threat to world peace.
Il va même plus loin en conférence:
I’ll tell you one thing: I found articles – not tripped in publications but in very sophisticated publications – saying, « Forget Lyndon Johnson! Forget the CIA! Forget Fidel Castro! MOSSAD killed JFK because they were upset by what he had done to Ben-Gurion. » So you see, we drop a few bombs like this in this book, unproven … (Historian Martin W. Sandler, Author of The Letters of John F. Kennedy, lecture at the JFK Museum; Nov 16, 2013, CSPAN2 | BookTV @51 min : 21 sec)
« Je vais vous dire une chose: j’ai trouvé des articles–pas dans des publications disjonctées mais dans des publications très sophistiquées–qui disaient: « Oubliez Lyndon Johnson ! Oubliez la CIA ! Oubliez Fidel Castro ! Le MOSSAD a tué JFK parce qu’ils étaient bouleversés à cause de ce qu’il avait fait à Ben-Gourion. » Alors, vous voyez, on lâche quelques petites bombes comme celle-ci dans le livre, non prouvées… »
Sur ce blog:
Hormis les médias juifs ou pro-palestiniens, personne ne parle du rapport américain déclassifié en février dernier confirmant l’existence du nucléaire israélien
Guerres sionistes et Option Samson: vers la délivrance ultime
S’ils vont en enfer ils nous emportent avec eux
L’option Samson comme justice ultime
Nixon s’est opposé à l’acquisition du nucléaire par Israel
La Grande-Bretagne craignait qu’Israël n’utilise la bombe atomique
Jimmy Carter révèle qu’Israel a 150 armes nucléaires
Flashback: Kadhafi dénonce le rôle central d’Israël dans l’assassinat de JFK
Khadafi: « le Mossad a assassiné JFK » (2008)
Kadhafi réitère ses propos sur l’assassinat de JFK par le Mossad
Assassinat de JFK: c’était pas des nazis!
L’assassinat de JFK: une décision de l’administration Ben-Gourion
L’arsenal nucléaire israélien au centre de la guerre secrète entre JFK et Israël
La connexion israélienne: la seule à réunir toutes les pièces du puzzle de l’assassinat de JFK
Israël admet que le producteur du JFK d’Oliver Stone, Arnon Milchan, était un agent du Mossad
Michael Collins Piper contre la mafia juive
Collection audiovisuelle et livresque de Michael Collins Piper (1960-2015)
Assassinat de JFK: rien à voir avec le décret 11110 et la Réserve Fédérale
Des sympathies et ambitions nationalistes de Joseph P. Kennedy
Pourquoi ils ont tenté de tuer de Gaulle
Déclassification de l’enquête sénatoriale sur le lobby sioniste aux USA (1963)
Les documents du FBI sur les fameux « Israéliens dansants » arrêtés le 11 septembre 2001