Pour une courte introduction en français, visionner cet extrait en français (@2:33) d’un important reportage de la BBC « Israel, Vanunu and the Bomb » (à voir en entier en version française).

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. « 

« 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. « 

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.

Previously classified meeting notes charting the discussion at a 1961 meeting between President John F. Kennedy and Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion were among the documents included in an April 21 release co-sponsored by the National Security Archive, the Nuclear Proliferation International History Project, and the Middlebury Institute’s James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies.

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.

Resources from the
National Security Archive’s
Nuclear Documentation Project

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.

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:

******************

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 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.

On 31 January 1961, only days after his inauguration, President Kennedy met with Ogden Reid, who had just resigned as U.S. ambassador to Israel, for a comprehensive briefing on U.S.-Israel relations, including the problem of the Dimona nuclear reactor (an issue in which the new president had a “special interest”). To help prepare the president for the meeting, Secretary of State Dean Rusk signed off on a briefing paper, which contained also a detailed chronology of the discovery of the Dimona reactor, and which reviewed the problems raised by the secret atomic project as well as U.S. interest in sending scientists there to determine whether there was a proliferation risk.

In their 45-minute meeting, Ambassador Reid told President Kennedy that he believed the U.S “can accept at face value Ben-Gurion’s assurance that the reactor is to be devoted to peaceful purposes” and that a visit to Dimona by a qualified American scientist could be arranged, “if it is done on a secret basis.”

 

Document 2A-E: Pressing for a Visit

Concerned about a recent visit to Cairo by Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister Vladimir Semenov and the possibility that the Soviets might exploit Egyptian concerns over Dimona, President Kennedy pressed State to arrange an inspection visit at Dimona by a U.S. scientist. Assistant Secretary of State G. Lewis Jones soon met with Israeli Ambassador Harman, who explained that the Israeli government was preoccupied with an ongoing domestic political crisis. Prime Minister Ben-Gurion announced his resignation and his intention to take a four-week vacation while still being head of a “caretaker government.” Moreover, Ambassador Harman could not understand why Washington had not simply accepted Ben-Gurion’s assurances about Dimona. Jones responded that suspicions remained and that as a “close friend,” Israel needed to help allay them.

After informing Kennedy about the Harman-Jones conversation, Secretary of State Rusk had his own meeting with Harman, where he also raised the desirability of a visit, noting that Israeli “candor” was important to the state of the U.S.-Israeli relationship. During that conversation as well as another with national security adviser McGeorge Bundy, Harman disparaged Dimona’s importance, arguing that its existence had leaked out “unnecessarily.” But Bundy emphasized “legitimate” Arab concern about the Israeli nuclear project. It is interesting to note that in internal American documents the reference is always to an “inspection,” but when the issue was discussed with Israeli diplomats, U.S. officials avoided raising their hackles by always referring to a “visit.”

It took many more weeks of back-and-forth American-Israeli exchanges after departing Ambassador Reid told President Kennedy that an American inspection could be arranged. While visiting the United States for fund raising purposes, Ben-Gurion’s chief of staff (and future mayor of Jerusalem) Theodore “Teddy” Kollek met with Ogden Reid in New York and with Assistant Secretary Jones in Washington. He told Reid that Ben-Gurion would accept a visit to Dimona once a new government had been formed in six to eight weeks. Kollek told Jones that a visit “during March” was possible and personally agreed that it would allay suspicions if Dimona was under the control of the Weizmann Institute instead of the Defense Ministry.

The news about a possible March visit went to President Kennedy, but on 13 March Ambassador Harman had nothing to report, claiming that the Israeli government was still preoccupied with domestic politics. At month’s end, Kennedy intervened, apparently calling Jones directly for information about the status of the U.S. request. Following up, Jones called in Ambassador Harman for an update, noting Kennedy’s keen interest in the matter and the importance of Israel removing any “shadow of doubt” about the purpose of Dimona. Harman had no news but believed that nothing would be resolved until Passover ended on 10 April. A chronology that Rusk attached to his memo to Kennedy indicated that the State Department had been asking about the visit at “approximately weekly intervals.”

By early April, Ben-Gurion realized he no longer could postpone the American visit to Dimona. His diary revealed that he was persuaded by White House special counsel Myer “Mike” Feldman, and Kennedy political ally Abraham Feinberg, who was involved in fund raising for Dimona, that a meeting between him and Kennedy, in return for an American visit at Dimona, could save the nuclear project. On 10 April, Ambassador Harman finally told Jones and Philip Farley, the special assistant to the secretary of state for atomic energy and outer space matters, that Israel was formally inviting a U.S. scientist to visit the Dimona complex during the week of 15 May, but that the visit should be secret. Jones and Farley agreed that the visit should not be publicized but worried that secrecy could be “counter-productive.” As Jones explained to Rusk the next day, “It seems to us to defeat the objective of establishing that the reactor is a normal civilian atomic project if extreme measures of secrecy are taken in connection with the visit.” Jones also informed Rusk that the Atomic Energy Commission had selected two of its scientists to make the visit: Ulysses Staebler, assistant director of reactor development and chief of the Civilian Power Reactors Branch, and Jesse Croach Jr., a heavy water reactor expert with Dupont, the AEC’s principal contractor for heavy water reactor work.

Jones wrote a briefing paper to help Rusk prepare to speak with Harman about the Dimona invitation, but the only record of their meeting that has surfaced publicly is the part of the conversation concerning Ben-Gurion’s request for a meeting with President Kennedy, possibly as early as the week of April 23. Rusk responded that he would pass on the request to the president but expressed his doubts as the president’s schedule was already full until the first week of June.

Israel kept pushing the necessity for secrecy, but Washington insisted that a “quiet visit” was enough to keep Croach and Staebler out of the spotlight. Moreover, the Kennedy administration wanted to be able to inform allies, such as the British, about the visit’s findings. While the Israelis wanted Washington to agree to push the visit back until after the Ben-Gurion-Kennedy meeting, the State Department, under instructions from the White House, refused to change the schedule: the administration wanted the visit to occur before Kennedy met with Ben-Gurion, so that the findings could be fully assessed. The State Department was determined to meet that goal, as was evident from the preparations for a meeting with the inspectors.

The second-ranking diplomat at the Israeli Embassy, Mordechai Gazit, raised questions to Phillip Farley about the real purposes of the U.S. visit to Dimona. Justifying the secrecy as protection for suppliers against the Arab boycott of Israel, Gazit argued that it would be years before the reactor could have any military potential and, in any event, Israel needed whatever “means it could find” to defend itself. Taking in Gazit’s implicit admission, Farley noted that Washington was concerned about the impact that an Israeli nuclear project aimed at weapons could have on the region and that an Israeli nuclear weapons program would be disastrous for world stability. “I could not see how Israel could long expect to have nuclear weapons without its enemies also getting them in some way. Once there, were nuclear weapons on both sides, I thought Israel would be in a desperate state.” Its territory was simply too small for it to survive even a small exchange.” Farley’s argument reflects the fundamental Israeli nuclear dilemma to this day.

President Kennedy told the new U.S. ambassador to Israel, Walworth Barbour, that he was concerned about Israel’s insistence on a secret visit as well as the “absence of a ‘neutral’ scientist” in the visit to Dimona. Addressing Kennedy’s concerns, the State Department took the position that it was better to put up with Ben-Gurion’s “sensitivities” about secrecy than “have no visit” at all. Nevertheless, the Department advised the White House that “complete and continued secrecy as to the results of the visit would [not] be possible.” The results of the visit would be conveyed to appropriate U.S. agencies “in due course” and would be shared perhaps with some “friendly” governments. Moreover, the U.S. believed that once the Israelis became used to visits to Dimona it might be possible to persuade them to accept visits by scientists from other countries or a publicized inspection by the IAEA.

During their visit to Israel (May 17-May 22), AEC scientists Croach and Staebler visited the Weizman Institute, the Technion, the USAEC-funded swimming pool experimental reactor at Soreq, and finally the Dimona complex then under construction. It was in that first visit that Israel provided its “cover” story for the Dimona project, a narrative of “plausible deniability” that would be observed during all future visits.[6] When Croach and Staebler met with State Department officials on their return, they said that they were “satisfied” that the reactor was “of the scope and peaceful character” claimed by Israeli officials. That could only be a tentative judgment because Dimona was still an unfinished project. Although Croach and Staebler found no evidence that the Israelis had nuclear weapons production in mind, they acknowledged that “the reactor eventually will produce small quantities of plutonium suitable for weapons.” Their official report to the AEC was far more circumspect, not mentioning the weapons potential or a capability to produce plutonium. Nevertheless, as noted earlier, they mentioned the Israeli statement about the possibility that the reactor’s power could be doubled in the future, which would increase the potential to produce plutonium.

On his way to the Vienna summit with Nikita Khrushchev, Kennedy stopped in Manhattan to meet with Ben-Gurion.[7] For both leaders, the Dimona question was a top priority; just as Kennedy wanted Israel to “remove any doubts” that other countries had about its purposes, so Ben-Gurion wanted to resolve this outstanding problem and to let the project be finished quietly. Ben-Gurion stood by his earlier statements that the “main” purpose of the reactor was peaceful – namely, internal economic development. Given Kennedy’s interest in regional stability and aversion to nuclear proliferation, he wanted to be able to let Israel’s Arab neighbors know about the positive results of the recent Dimona visit by American scientists.

The official U.S. memorandum of conversation is published in the State Department’s Foreign Relations of the United States (the file copy at the National Archives is classified even though the FRUS volume has been published), and an Israeli English-language version is also available. As noted earlier, a draft of the official memcon has surfaced which has some interesting differences with the final versions: for example, Ben-Gurion’s tacit acknowledgement of a nuclear weapons potential and a statement suggesting freedom of action about eventual reprocessing. The Israeli minutes of the conversation manifest Ben-Gurion’s ambiguities and evasiveness even more strongly, for example, his assertion that “for the time being, the only purposes of [the Dimona reactor] are for peace.” Moreover, he said, “we will see what happens in the Middle East.”

When Kennedy said that he would like to share the findings of the Dimona visit with other governments, Ben-Gurion did not object to that or the possibility of visits by “neutral” scientists. The British had already asked for information on the Kennedy-Ben-Gurion meeting and one day later, their embassy was given the gist of the Dimona visit report as well as a brief description of the meeting. The State Department made plans to brief Arab governments, but Deputy Assistant Secretary Armin Meyer asked Ambassador Harman if his government would be willing to work with U.S. representatives at the IAEA Board of Governors meeting to make an announcement of the visit to Dimona and also to undertake quiet discussions at the meeting about a possible neutral visit to Dimona. Harman, however, objected to an IAEA role in the Dimona matter until the rest of the world had accepted the idea of inspections and he wanted Washington to coordinate any visit by neutral scientists.

The State Department had already sent a message to Egyptian Foreign Minister Fawzi about the visit and soon sent a circular telegram to embassies in the region, but also to Oslo (Norway was interested because of its heavy water sales to Israel). Through those messages the “highest levels” of those governments were to be informed that the U.S. scientists had “found no evidence” of Israeli preparations for producing nuclear weapons.

The State Department’s assurances notwithstanding, within U.S. intelligence circles doubts lingered. In a National Intelligence Estimate on Israel, declassified in 2015 at the request of the National Security Archive, the U.S. intelligence community 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.

Moreover, if the Israeli had made such a decision, by 1965-1966, the Dimona reactor would produce enough plutonium to build one or two nuclear weapons a year, although to do that they would need larger processing capabilities than the pilot plant then in the works. Other obstacles were the lack of testing facilities and the problem that a test would use up scarce fissile material supplies. Another obstacle, cited by State Department atomic energy adviser Philip Farley in a letter to an AEC official, was a lack of weapons design information. In light of that concern, Farley advised the AEC to be “alert” to the possibility that Israeli scientists might try to acquire nuclear weapons design information “through clandestine means in the United States.” Thus, “discreet surveillance” was necessary of Dr. Israel Dostrovsky, an eminent Israeli chemist, who had recently been given a teaching fellowship at Brookhaven National Laboratory. An expert on isotopes and isotope separation, Dostrovsky was a key figure in Israel’s nuclear-scientific establishment, later becoming the director general of the Atomic Energy Commission (1966-1970). That Dotrovsky had close ties to the Israeli defense establishment may have influenced the notion that he should be a target for surveillance.[8]

The Kennedy administration had to balance its apprehensions over Dimona with other concerns, such as the broader implications of the status of Palestinian refugees. With respect to Dimona, the State Department kept in mind President Kennedy’s interest in visits by neutral scientists and Ben-Gurion’s approval of such. Moreover, State Department officials believed that a neutral visit could “obviate any overtones of inspections, which is [sic] unacceptable to Israel,” and also make it possible for Washington to avoid being the sole “guarantor of Israel’s nuclear intentions” on the basis of the May 1961 visit by AEC scientists. During a meeting with Ambassador Harman, Phillips Talbot brought up again the idea of neutral visits and mentioned that Farley had some suggestions to make. Harman said that he would be happy to meet with Farley but that Israel would “prefer a visit by Scandinavian or Swiss scientists.”

That the Central Intelligence Agency has kept secret important findings about the Dimona project is evident from this heavily excised report to McGeorge Bundy, which has been under appeal since 2010. Whatever the findings were, they were enough to induce Bundy to ask his aide, Robert Komer, to “prod” the State Department to arrange “another periodic check on this by scientists.” That, however, would take time.

Among other records, the CIA has also withheld in its entirety a scientific intelligence report, from early 1962, on the Israeli nuclear program; it is currently under appeal with the Interagency Security Classification Appeals panel.

Worried about the possibility of a nuclear arms race in the Middle East, especially in light of Egyptian talks with West Germany about the acquisition of a reactor, the British wanted to find ways to meet Arab concerns about Dimona by bringing the site under scrutiny of the emerging IAEA safeguards/inspection system. The British recognized that achieving this would be very difficult – the Israelis objected to IAEA inspection because they professed to be worried about the inclusion of Soviet bloc officials on the inspection teams; moreover, the French, who had supplied the reactor and fuel elements, were also unlikely to accept international inspection of the irradiated fuel. Nevertheless, because Dimona was not yet an operating reactor (and the IAEA Safeguards Division was still being created), the British suggested preliminary, ad hoc steps, such as inspection by a “neutral” (in terms of the Arab-Israeli dispute) observer such as Canada. They believed that because of Israel’s reluctance, U.S. “pressure” would be required.

The State Department concurred with the objective of the British proposal: “we fully agree on the desirability of bringing Near East nuclear development under IAEA control.” Nevertheless, believing that Israeli and French objections were not likely to yield to “pressure,” State Department officials also favored pursuing such steps as visits by “neutral” scientists.. They believed, however, that Canada was not neutral enough because it was so closely associated with the IAEA; nor was Ottawa likely to get any more information than Washington could. Washington had been holding talks with the Swedes, but if they did not pan out, the U.S. could arrange a second visit by its scientists.

No documents about U.S. efforts to find a “neutral” visitor have surfaced so far, but apparently the Swedes expressed only “faint interest” in playing a role, which led Washington to decide to “undertake the responsibility once more.” As it had been over a year since the first visit, U.S. diplomats believed that if the Israelis agreed to another one it would provide an opportunity for Washington to preserve a “favorable atmosphere” in the region by making assurances about the reactor to Cairo and other Arab capitals (as long as the assurances were warranted). On 22 June, Talbot renewed the question with Ambassador Harman but the lack of response led Talbot to bring up the matter on 14 September. By then two AEC scientists were scheduled to visit the U.S.-financed reactor at Soreq in a matter of days and it made sense for them to include a visit to Dimona. Harman, however, said that no decision could be made until later in the month when Ben-Gurion was back from a European trip.

Never making a formal reply to the U.S. request, the Israelis used the ploy of an improvised visit to evade the substance of a real visit. As noted in the introduction, decades later an Israeli source confirmed to Avner Cohen that this was indeed a trick. While the two AEC scientists, Thomas Haycock and Ulysses Staebler, did not see the complete installation, they believed that they had enough time to determine that Dimona was a research reactor, not a production reactor, which, from their point of view, made the visit “satisfactory.” U.S. intelligence did not agree because the visit left unanswered questions, such as “whether in fact the reactor might give Israel a nuclear weapons capability.”

A few weeks after the visit, just as the Cuban Missile Crisis was unfolding, the State Department began to inform selected governments about its results. U.S. diplomats told Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, during a briefing on the Cuban situation, that the visit confirmed Israeli statements about the reactor. The British and Canadians were also told about the “recent brief visit” to Dimona, without explaining what had made it so short. By the end of October, the Department sent a fuller statement to embassies in the Middle East, as well as London, Paris, Ottawa, and Oslo.

[1]. Richard Reeves, President Kennedy: Profile in Power (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), pp. 29-33.

[2]. Avner Cohen, Israel and the Bomb (New York, Columbia University Press, 1998), 108-11; Warren Bass, Support Any friend, 2003, 200-02.

[3]. In conversations Avner Cohen had with the late John Hadden, the CIA station chief in Israel during 1964-68, he made it apparent that his office was fully clear about “what was Dimona doing,” including reprocessing, and was not allowed to maintain any contact with the visiting AEC scientists. See also Israel and the Bomb 187-90.

[4]. Avner Cohen, Israel and the Bomb, 112.

[5]. Yuval Ne’eman told Avner Cohen about his “trick” on the visit of 1962 in many of the conversations during the 1990s and 2000s. When Cohen published Israel and the Bomb in 1998 he cited only a condensed version of Ne’eman tale—Ne’eman still considered it sensitive in the 1990s. Now, almost ten years after his passing (2006), Cohen is comfortable citing his tale in more detail.

According to Ne’eman in an interview conducted in March 1994, as the host of the two AEC scientists who had arrived to inspect the Soreq reactor (under the terms of the “Atoms for Peace” program) he “arranged” to take them for a tour of the Dead Sea. This was a well-planned pretext to bring them to Dimona on Israeli terms. So, on their way back, by late afternoon, 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 whom inspector Staebler had known from the visit a year earlier, in May 1961. Ne’eman told them this was a great opportunity since their government was pressing for such a visit. The purpose was, of course, to have a much more informal and abbreviated visit rather than the formal one the US government wanted. In doing so, Israel would ease American pressure and convince the visitors that Dimona was a research reactor, not a production reactor. When the United States continued to press for a visit, Ne’eman told them, “you just did it.”

[6]. For more information on the visit, see Cohen, Israel and the Bomb, 105-108.

[7]. For the Kennedy-Ben-Gurion meeting, see ibid, 108-109.

[8]. Ibid , 21.

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… »