Israeli Nukes and England II

Britain secretly supplied Israel with plutonium in 1966 despite warnings
from military intelligence that it could allow them to develop a nuclear
bomb.

BBC2's Newsnight reports that the deal was recorded in top secret
documents obtained under freedom of information laws.

Along with 10 milligrammes of plutonium, the UK supplied hundreds of
shipments of other materials which could have helped a nuclear weapons
programme, including compounds of uranium, lithium, beryllium and
tritium, as well as heavy water, according to Newsnight.

The deals took place as Israel developed its secret Dimona nuclear
reactor, which is believed to have allowed the country to acquire
nuclear weapons by the time of the Six Day War in 1967.

Newsnight uncovered documents last year which suggested Britain supplied
heavy water during the premiership of Conservative Prime Minister Harold
Macmillan, allowing Israel to start up production of plutonium at Dimona.

____________________

Secret sale of UK plutonium to Israel

By Meirion Jones
BBC Newsnight

The UK supplied Israel with quantities of plutonium while Harold Wilson
was prime minister, BBC Newsnight can reveal.

The sale was made despite a warning from British intelligence that it
might "make a material contribution to an Israeli weapons programme".

Under Wilson, Britain also sold Israel tons of chemicals used to make
boosted atom bombs 20 times more powerful than Hiroshima or even
Hydrogen Bombs.

In Harold Macmillan's time the UK supplied uranium 235 and the heavy
water which allowed Israel to start up its nuclear weapons production
plant at Dimona - heavy water which British intelligence estimated would
allow Israel to make "six nuclear weapons a year".

	 All export licensing of materials associated with civil nuclear
programmes went through stringent checks across Whitehall
Foreign Office
Last August on BBC Newsnight we revealed the first British/Israeli deal,
the sale of the heavy water, but the government responded by telling the
International Atomic Energy Agency the UK was not a party to any sale to
Israel and that all it did was sell some heavy water back to Norway.

Hundreds of shipments

Using Freedom of Information, Newsnight has obtained top secret papers.
They show Foreign Minister Kim Howells misled the IAEA and that Britain
made not one, but hundreds of secret shipments of nuclear materials to
Israel.

Tony Benn became Minister of Technology in 1966 while the plutonium deal
was going through. The nuclear industry was part of his "white heat of
technology" brief but no one told him that we were exporting atomic
energy materials to Israel.

"I'm not only surprised, I'm shocked," he says, adding that neither he
nor his predecessor Frank Cousins, who was a member of CND, agreed to
the sales.

Benn says he always suspected civil servants were doing deals behind his
back but he never thought they would sell plutonium to Israel. "It never
occurred to me they would authorise something so totally against the
policy of the government."

Dimona

Back in August 1960 covertly taken photos of a mysterious site at Dimona
in Israel arrived at Defence Intelligence Staff (DIS) in Whitehall. A
brilliant analyst called Peter Kelly immediately realized they showed a
secret nuclear reactor and he alerted the rest of British intelligence.

Kelly recognized it was a French reactor and soon discovered where the
heavy water to run it had come from.

Britain had bought heavy water from Norsk Hydro in Norway for its
nuclear weapons programme but found it was surplus to requirements and
needed a buyer. The papers obtained by Newsnight show that a company
called Noratom acted as a consultant and arranged the deals in return
for a 2% commission.

Britain knew all along that Israel wanted the heavy water "to produce
plutonium" and Israel paid the full military price - £1 million - to
avoid safeguards to stop the plutonium being used to make nuclear weapons.

Kelly discovered a charade was played out with the UK and Israeli
delegations sitting in adjacent rooms while Noratom ferried separate
contracts to and fro so Britain could say they hadn't signed a deal with
Israel.

Cover story

Once the press heard about Dimona in December 1960 there was an
international outcry. Israel put out a cover story that it was a small
research reactor. This did not fool Kelly. Using the figure of 20 tons
of heavy water he estimated that Israel could build a reactor capable of
producing "significant quantities of plutonium".

British intelligence learnt there was also a reprocessing plant and
concluded "the separation of plutonium can only mean that Israel intends
to produce nuclear weapons". Kelly even discovered that an Israeli
observer had been allowed to watch one of the first French nuclear tests
in Algeria.

Kelly and his colleagues in intelligence soon found their views about
Israel were being challenged by Britain's representative at the IAEA
Mike Michaels, who worked for one of the main figures in Harold
Macmillan's Cabinet - Lord Hailsham.

Michaels received a JIC report early in 1961 estimating Israel would
take at least three years to make enough plutonium and then another six
months to work out how to make a bomb.

But it occurred to him that a friendly power might give Israel a small
sample of plutonium to speed up the process. "Perhaps the French have
supplied a small quantity for experimental purposes as we did to the
French in like circumstances some years ago," he noted in the margin of
the report. A few years later Michaels persuaded the UK to sell Israel a
small sample of plutonium when he was aware - as this note shows - that
this might cut months off the time it took them to get the Bomb.

Invitation

The Israeli nuclear chief, Ernst David Bergmann, personally invited
Michaels to Israel. Kelly warned Israel might use Michaels as part of a
disinformation campaign to show "everything is above board". Michaels
was given VIP treatment. He met not only Bergmann but Shimon Peres and
Prime Minister David Ben Gurion - the three fathers of the Israeli Bomb.

As Kelly suspected, Michaels' report gave Israel the all clear and he
handed it to Hailsham at a crucial time, two days before Ben Gurion met
Harold Macmillan at Downing Street.

In 1962 the Dimona reactor started turning uranium into plutonium,
thanks to the heavy water Britain had delivered, but Michaels continued
to protest Israel's innocence.

Then at the beginning of 1966 UK Atomic Energy Authority made what they
remarkably called a "pretty harmless request". They wanted to export 10
milligrammes of plutonium to Israel. The MoD strongly objected and
Defence Intelligence wrote directly to say the sale might have
"significant military value".

The Foreign Office told UKAEA "It is HMG's policy not to do anything
which would assist Israel in the production of nuclear weapons" and
therefore they blocked the sale.

Sale

Michaels wrote angrily "to protest strongly" against the decision. Five
years earlier he had noted such a sale could speed up the Israeli bomb
programme, now he was powerfully advocating just that. He said small
quantities of plutonium were not important and anyhow if we didn't sell
it to the Israelis someone else would. The Foreign Office gave in and
the sale went ahead. Kelly believes Mike Michaels knew all along that
Israel was after the Bomb. He died in 1992.

Tony Benn is incredulous that Michaels never referred the Israeli
nuclear sales to him or Frank Cousins. They were after all the ministers
in charge of Britain's nuclear industry including imports and exports.
"Michaels lied to me. I learned by bitter experience that the nuclear
industry lied to me again and again".

The atomic files, which have been classified until now, detail hundreds
of nuclear deals with Israel flagged up as sensitive.

Benn's initial reaction to whether Harold Wilson knew about atomic
exports to Israel was "it's inconceivable". Then he muses: "Harold was
sympathetic to Israel," before concluding that this was probably a
conspiracy by civil servants and the nuclear industry to flout HMG policy.

This report can be seen on Newsnight on Thursday, 9 March, 2006.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/4789832.stm

Published: 2006/03/09 18:50:19 GMT
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/4789832.stm

_______________________

Britain's dirty secret

Cover story - New Statesman- Monday 13th March 2006
Meirion Jones

Exculsive - Secret papers show how Britain helped Israel make the A-bomb
in the 1960s, supplying tons of vital chemicals including plutonium and
uranium. And it looks as though Harold Wilson and his ministers knew
nothing about it. By Meirion Jones

Mirage jets swoop from the sky to destroy the Egyptian air force before
breakfast; tanks race across the desert to the Suez Canal; Moshe Dayan,
the defence minister, poses with eyepatch after the Jerusalem brigade
has fought its way into the Old City. These are the heroic images of the
Six Day War and they defined Israeli daring: here was a people who, it
seemed, risked everything on a throw of the dice. Years later the world
discovered that there was an insurance policy.

They had a secret weapon - two, to be precise. In the weeks before
Israel took on the Arab world in June 1967 it put together a pair of
crude nuclear bombs, just in case things didn't go as planned. Making
them required not only Israeli ingenuity but also plenty of help from
abroad. It has been known for some time that the French helped build
Israel's reactor and reprocessing plant at Dimona, but over the past
year our research team at BBC Newsnight has unearthed something no less
astonishing and much closer to home - top-secret files which show how
Britain helped Israel get the atomic bomb.

We can reveal that while Harold Wilson was prime minister the UK
supplied Israel with small quantities of plutonium despite a warning
from British intelligence that it might "make a material contribution to
an Israeli weapons programme". This, by enabling Israel to study the
properties of plutonium before its own supplies came on line, could have
taken months off the time it needed to make a weapon. Britain also sold
Israel a whole range of other exotic chemicals, including uranium-235,
beryllium and lithium-6, which are used in atom bombs and even hydrogen
bombs. And in Harold Macmillan's time we supplied the heavy water that
allowed Israel to start up its own plutonium production facility at
Dimona - heavy water that British intelligence estimated would enable
Israel to make "six nuclear weapons a year".

After we exposed the sale of the heavy water on Newsnight last August,
the government assured the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)
that all Britain did was sell some heavy water back to Norway. Using the
Freedom of Information Act, we have now obtained previously top-secret
papers which show not only that Norway was a mere cover for the Israel
deal, but that Britain made hundreds of other secret shipments of
nuclear materials to Israel in the 1950s and 1960s.

Tony Benn became technology minister in 1966, while the plutonium deal
was going through. Though the nuclear industry was part of his brief,
nobody told him we were exporting atomic energy materials to Israel.
"I'm not only surprised," he says, "I'm shocked." Neither he nor his
predecessor Frank Cousins agreed to the sales, he insists, and though he
always suspected civil servants of doing deals behind his back, "it
never occurred to me they would authorise something so totally against
the policy of the government".

The documentary evidence is backed by eyewitness testimony. Back in
August 1960, when covert photographs of a mysterious site at Dimona in
Israel arrived at Defence Intelligence Staff (DIS) in Whitehall, a
brilliant analyst called Peter Kelly saw immediately that they showed a
secret nuclear reactor. Today Kelly, physically frail but mentally
acute, lives in retirement on the south coast, and as he leafs through
the "UK Eyes Only" reports he wrote about Israel for MI5 and MI6, he
smiles. "I was quite perceptive," he says. Kelly recognised that the
Dimona reactor was a French design, and he very soon discovered where
the heavy water needed to operate it had come from. When we explain that
the government has told the IAEA that Britain thought it was selling the
heavy water to Norway he laughs heartily.

What really happened was this: Britain had bought the heavy water from
Norsk Hydro in Norway for its nuclear weapons programme, but found it
was surplus to requirements and decided to sell. An arrangement was
indeed made with a Norwegian company, Noratom, but crucially the papers
show that Noratom was not the true buyer: the firm agreed to broker a
deal with Israel in return for a 2 per cent commission. Israel paid the
top price - £1m - to avoid having to give guarantees that the material
would not be used to make nuclear weapons, but the papers leave no doubt
that Britain knew all along that Israel wanted the heavy water "to
produce plutonium". Kelly discovered that a charade was played out, with
British and Israeli delegations sitting in adjacent rooms while Noratom
ferried contracts between them to maintain the fiction that Britain had
not done the deal with Israel.



The transaction was signed off for the Foreign Office by Donald Cape,
whose job it was to make sure we didn't export materials that would help
other countries get the atom bomb. He felt it would be "overzealous" to
demand safeguards to prevent Israel using the chemical in weapons
production. Cape is 82 now, tall, clear-headed and living in Surrey. He
told us the deal was done because "nobody suspected the Israelis hoped
to manufacture nuclear weapons", but his own declassified letters from
March 1959 suggest otherwise. They show, for example, that the Foreign
Office knew Israel had pulled out of a deal to buy uranium from South
Africa when Pretoria asked for safeguards to prevent it being used for
making nuclear weapons. It also knew the CIA was warning that "the
Israelis must be expected to try and establish a nuclear weapons
programme". Just weeks later, however, Britain started shipping heavy
water direct to Israel: the first shipment left in June 1959 and the
second in June 1960.

There was another problem: the Americans. There was no US-Israeli
alliance in those days and Washington was determined to prevent nuclear
weapons proliferation. If Britain told the Americans about the Israeli
deal they would stop it. Donald Cape decided on discretion: "I would
rather not tell the Americans." When Newsnight told Robert McNamara -
John F Ken-nedy's defence secretary - about this he was amazed. "The
fact Israel was trying to develop a nuclear bomb should not have come as
a surprise, but that Britain should have supplied it with heavy water
was indeed a surprise to me," he said.

Kelly's reports for the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) on "secret
atomic activities in Israel" show that Britain's defence and espionage
establishment had no doubt about what was going on in Israel. Kelly
wrote of underground galleries at the Dimona complex; there were such
galleries. He correctly described the French role in the project. He
identified the importance of the heavy water: with 20 tons of this
material, he estimated, Israel could have a reactor capable of producing
"significant quantities of plutonium". British intelligence also knew
about the reprocessing facility at Dimona and stated: "The separation of
plutonium can only mean that Israel intends to produce nuclear weapons."
Kelly even discovered that an Israeli observer had been allowed to watch
one of the first French nuclear tests in Algeria.

Kelly and his colleagues, however, found their views were being
challenged. Chief of the challengers was Michael Israel Michaels (such
was his middle name, literally), who was a senior official at the
science ministry under Lord Hailsham during the Macmillan government,
and went on to serve at the technology ministry under Benn. He was also
Britain's representative at the IAEA.

In 1961 Michaels was invited to Israel by the Israeli nuclear chief
Ernst David Bergmann, and while there was given VIP treatment. He met
not only Bergmann but Shimon Peres, the deputy defence minister, and
David Ben-Gurion, the prime minister - the three fathers of the Israeli
atomic bomb. Peter Kelly had warned his superiors that Israel might use
the Michaels trip as part of a disinformation campaign to show
"everything is above board", and this is what appears to have happened.
Michaels's report gave Israel the all-clear, and he handed it to
Hailsham at an important moment, two days before Ben-Gurion met
Macmillan at Downing Street. Kelly later took the report apart line by
line and concluded by offering his own prediction that Israel might have
a "deliverable warhead" by 1967.

In 1962 the Dimona reactor started operating (thanks to the heavy water
Britain had delivered), yet Michaels continued to protest Israel's
innocence. The Israelis, meanwhile, were allowing the US to make
inspection visits to Dimona once a year to demonstrate that it was not
being used for military purposes, but Kelly saw that this, too, was a
con. The tours were "heavily stage managed", he wrote in 1963, and
"important developments were concealed". He was right: we now know that
false walls screened parts of the plant from the inspectors.

Three years later, at the beginning of 1966, something extraordinary
happened. The UK Atomic Energy Authority made what it called a "pretty
harmless request" to the government: it wanted to export ten milligrams
of plutonium to Israel. The Ministry of Defence strongly objected, with
Defence Intelligence (Kelly's department) arguing that the sale might
have "significant military value". The Foreign Office duly blocked it,
ruling: "It is HMG's policy not to do anything which would assist Israel
in the production of nuclear weapons."

Michaels was furious. He wrote "to protest strongly" against the
decision, saying that small quantities of plutonium were not important
and anyhow if we didn't sell it to the Israelis someone else would.
Michaels could be a bulldozer - he was short and bald, described as
pugnacious and hard-headed by colleagues - and he won his battle.
Eventually the Foreign Office caved in and the sale went ahead.

What is most surprising about the position adopted by Michaels is that,
as the new documents show, a few years earlier he had taken the direct
opposite view of the value of small quantities of plutonium. In 1961 he
received a JIC report suggesting that Israel would take at least three
years to make enough plutonium and then another six months to work out
how to make a bomb. In the margin beside the claim about the six months
he wrote: "This surely is an understatement if the Israelis have no
plutonium on which to experiment in advance." Then it occurred to him
that a friendly power might give Israel a sample of plutonium to speed
up the process: "Perhaps the French have supplied a small quantity for
experimental purposes as we did to the French in like circumstances some
years ago" (see panel, above). What this shows is that Michaels, in the
full knowledge of how useful it could be for weapons development, went
on to persuade the British government to sell Israel a sample of plutonium.

Today, Tony Benn can hardly believe that Michaels never referred the
nuclear sales to him. Going through his diaries, Benn finds dozens of
references to meetings with Michaels which show that he didn't trust him
even then. "Michaels lied to me. I learned by bitter experience that the
nuclear industry lied to me again and again." Kelly believes that
Michaels knew all along what Israel was doing, but since he died in 1992
we can't ask him. According to his son Chris, after Michaels retired
from the IAEA in 1971 the Israelis found him a job in London for a
couple of years.

The atomic files give details of hundreds more nuclear deals with
Israel. Many are small orders for compounds of uranium, beryllium and
tritium, as well as other materials that can be used for both innocent
and military purposes. In November 1959 someone at the Foreign Office
allowed through the export of a small quantity of uranium-235 to Israel,
apparently without realising that it was a core nuclear explosive
material just like plutonium.

Some materials may have been for advanced bombs. In 1966 UKAEA supplied
Israel with 1.25 grams of almost pure lithium-6. When combined with
deuterium, this material provides the fusion fuel for hydrogen bombs.
Britain also supplied two tons of unenriched lithium, from which
lithium-6 is extracted - enough for several hydrogen bombs. Deuterium,
incidentally, is normally extracted from heavy water, which, of course,
Britain had already shipped to Israel.



Throughout this period, Defence Intelligence repeatedly complained that
Israel was the only country getting nuclear export licences "on the
basis of the meaningless phrase 'scientific and research purposes'". The
Department of Trade tried to exempt Israeli deals completely on the
grounds that these were government-to-government transactions, but DIS
was outraged, saying such deals were meant only for "people like most of
our Nato partners who can be trusted . . . Israel however is a very
different kettle of fish." In August 1966 the Israeli armed forces
ordered advanced radiation dosimeters. The Foreign Office said yes and
overruled the strong objections of the British MoD that they were
obviously for use by troops. DIS wanted to know why Israel was always
given special treatment, adding: "We feel quite strongly about all this."

Tony Benn wonders whether these deals could have gone ahead without the
knowledge of the British prime ministers of the time, Macmillan, Sir
Alec Douglas-Home and Wilson. The evidence is unclear. The newly
declassified papers show that in 1958 a member of the board of UKAEA
said he was going to refer the heavy-water deal to the authority's
executive, which reported directly to Macmillan, but there is no record
that this happened. We know that Lord Hailsham learned about the
heavy-water deal after it had gone through and concluded that Israel was
"preparing for a weapons programme".

Benn's initial reaction to whether Wilson knew about the atomic exports
to Israel was that it was "inconceivable". Then he hesitated, observing,
"Harold was sympathetic to Israel," but concluded that no, he probably
did not know. Benn believes that the exports were probably pushed
through by civil servants working with the nuclear industry.

There was no plausible civilian use for heavy water, plutonium, U235,
highly enriched lithium and many of the other materials shipped to
Israel. The heavy water allowed Israel to fire up Dimona and produce the
plutonium that still sits in Israel's missile warheads today. The small
sample of plutonium could have shaved months off the development time of
the Israeli atomic bomb in the run-up to the Six Day War.

In a letter this year to Sir Menzies Campbell, the Foreign Office
minister Kim Howells has quietly conceded Britain knew the heavy water
was going to Israel. He has yet to find time to tell the IAEA that, or
indeed to tell it about the plutonium or the uranium-235 or the enriched
lithium. Howells and his boss, Jack Straw, are too busy telling the IAEA
about the dangers of nuclear proliferation in another corner of the
Middle East.

Meirion Jones produced Michael Crick's report for Newsnight (BBC2) on
the Israeli nuclear sales, which is broadcast on 9 March



How we helped the French

In May 1954 the French were fighting and losing their colonial war
against Ho Chi Minh's armies in Vietnam. At home they were slowly
establishing a nuclear infrastructure, but the setbacks in Indochina
convinced some that they needed the atomic bomb and they needed it quickly.

On 6 May, therefore, as the final battle at Dien Bien Phu neared its
climax, France's nuclear bosses sent a request to the chairman of the
British Atomic Energy Authority. It was a shopping list of items that
would help them build nuclear weapons, including a sample quantity of
plutonium "so we can take the steps preparatory to the utilisation of
our own plutonium". Britain knew about these things: it had exploded its
own bomb less than two years earlier.

Before the letter even arrived the French had lost the battle and the
war. Later that year the French prime minister, Pierre Mendes France,
made the formal decision to build the atomic bomb. It took another year
to negotiate the deal, but in the end Britain agreed to supply nuclear
materials, including enriched uranium. Among the most important parts of
the agreement was an arrangement for the British to check the blueprints
and construction of French plutonium production reactors.

According to one source, this not only helped the French get their
military plutonium reactor at Marcoule into operation quickly but it
also averted a disaster, for the British found defects which could have
caused a catastrophic explosion at the Rhone Valley site. The same
source says that when Charles de Gaulle came to power in 1958 he
personally thanked Harold Macmillan for the team's work.

There remained France's request for plutonium. In 1955 Britain agreed to
export ten grams but "we would not tell the US that we were going to
give the French plutonium nor about any similar cases". France exploded
its first atomic bomb in 1960.
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