06/24/14 – Grant F. Smith – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Our first guest on the show today is our good friend Grant F. Smith from the Institute for Research Middle East Policy.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
Hey, Scott, thanks for having me back once again.
Good, good.
Yeah, very happy to have you here.
And let me see, I'm trying to pull up your bio so I can say the name of some of your books.
Here, the latest is Divert, NUMEC, Zalman Shapiro, and the Diversion of U.S. Weapons-Grade Uranium into the Israeli Nuclear Weapons Program.
Oh yeah, that's the Institute for Research Middle East Policy at irmep.org.
And that's the subject of this article today, running at antiwar.com.
It's called Death of the Masked Man, about a CIA officer named John Haddon.
Who is John Haddon?
Good.
Okay.
Well, he was a CIA station chief in Tel Aviv during the Six-Day War.
And he passed away last year, almost unnoticed by any journalist, except for his local newspaper up in Maine.
And so it was very interesting looking around at all the material.
He was outspoken for a CIA guy, particularly one in such sensitive positions.
But he had been summoned by the head of the Mossad in 67 before the war.
And he was very blunt telling the Israelis that not only should they not attack, but that if they did, both Russia and the United States would be opposing them.
And stood up in a way that was uncharacteristic of the way most U.S. politicians and State Department and government people stand up.
He had suggested that, kind of like in the Suez Crisis a decade before, that the U.S. position was they should not attack, and that U.S. aid might be on the line if they did, and not to surprise the U.S. So it's interesting because none of this is mentioned or was mentioned in his obituary, along with a lot of other very interesting confrontations that he had with Israeli intelligence.
So one of the interesting things about what actually happened that his son transcribed from a series of interviews, and I believe he published them only posthumously, was that during the Six-Day War, someone had called from LBJ's CIA on a weekend and tried to convince Hatton that he should authorize or tell the Mossad that the U.S. was okay if they took some sort of drastic action, and realizing that this is probably some junior political appointee, Hatton just dropped that into the shredder and said that there were many such moments in his career where he was on the spot like that.
So that was a very interesting quote from his son, who took some 20 hours of taped interviews of his somewhat reluctant father about 10 years ago, but only coming out now.
So why is it important now?
I think it's important now because there's another spy who's just receiving dozens of obituaries, and it was a guy that John Hatton really went up against as part of someone's job pursuing U.S. interests and trying to rein in the Israelis, and that was Avram Shalom.
Shalom's name formerly was Avram Bender, and his glowing obituaries talk about how he accompanied Rafi Itan to kidnap Adolf Eichmann in Buenos Aires and bring him to Israel for a trial for war crimes.
He was a Nazi.
But they don't mention the fact that this same Avram Bender, who later became somewhat critical of Israel's treatment of Palestinians, that he was also one of the team that went into this plant that we've talked about before, Numic in Pennsylvania, to help steal weapons-grade uranium.
So you've got all these accolades and sort of glowing obituaries about Shalom, nothing about Hatton, and all of Shalom, a.k.a.
Bender's actions targeting the U.S. have been edited out.
So I found that very interesting and kind of tried to contrast the two obituaries and histories in this article.
All right, now, so there's a lot to go back over there, a lot of interesting stuff.
First of all, 1967, well, jeez, Israel had to defend themselves because the Arabs were trying to push them into the sea.
What's in controversy about that?
Well, you know, I know you're laying out the bait there, Scott, but virtually all of the historians that come on your show, the ones who actually know something about the event, no longer even call it a preemptive or preventive war, since the Egyptians really showed no sign or means to attack, even though some of them were ragtag members or masked on the border, it now looks more and more like a sneak attack that was engaged in to accomplish some of the things that Israel did accomplish, which was territory.
We'll be right back with Grant F.
Smith from IRMEP in just a second.
Hey, y'all, Scott here.
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Oh, my, how time flies.
Let's see here.
I got to get back to Grant F. Smith from the Institute for Research Middle East Policy.
Boy, oh, boy, is that a website full of PDFs of FOIA documents about Israel's policy in the United States of America going back generations.
Grant F. Smith.
That's why it's called the Institute for Research.
It ain't just a nice name.
It's apt.
And so, yeah, we're talking about when we're going to get to Israeli nuclear smuggling and the rest of that in just a second here.
But we're talking about this article that Grant wrote that's running at antiwar.com today, Death of the Masked Man.
Oh, Death of the Masked Men.
CIA's John Haddon ignored as Israeli spy Abraham Bendor celebrated.
And so part of this story is about the death of this CIA guy and how all the obituaries, if there were any, didn't really make any mention of all the great things that he'd done, which most of which were, I guess, trying to thwart the Israelis.
And so where we were interrupted at the break was the part where Israel started the 1967 war.
And I'll just go ahead and mention here real quick, I got the full quote in context here from the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
That's MFA.gov.il is the whole thing from an Israeli government website.
The speech from August 8th, 1982 by Prime Minister Begin at the National Defense College, where he admits that, meh, yeah, we just decided to attack Egypt.
And no, there's no real evidence that they were going to attack us.
We just decided that we want to and we wanted to.
And so there you go.
No point lying about it.
So that's what we're talking about.
But then so it gets all anecdoty because this guy Haddon was there and told them, hey, don't do it.
America and Russia both will agree that we're going to be pissed off at you if you attack Egypt.
And then they went ahead and did it anyway.
Is that right, Grant?
That's right.
There's more detail that I didn't write about, which was, you know, you have the Egyptian, one of the Egyptian government officials traveling to Washington to try and, you know, iron things out when he finds out that the attack has begun.
So, you know, yeah, you you've got the definitely got the money quote there.
And it really destroys some of, I believe, some of the other guys have mentioned the whole case for preventive or preemptive war is, in some case, tied to the mythology of the 1967 Six Day War.
So it's really under attack by the facts.
But the fact that this person in charge with the highest intelligence post in country was communicating what he thought were the marching orders and he was being and run and also fed kind of bogus operations instructions from the CIA on weekends is interesting detail about about the environment over there.
Yeah, it's interesting, too, about the anecdote there.
I don't know if there's much more to elaborate on there, but what you mentioned about him getting instructions on the weekend from some political appointee flunky over at CIA headquarters or somewhere telling him to to give the Israelis carte blanche, basically, and he just refused to carry out the order.
Is that right?
Yeah, exactly.
Now, it's not it's not clear from the transcription exactly what that action was.
You know, you got to hope it wasn't.
Oh, I use some of the nuclear weapons that we know you have.
You got to hope it wasn't that.
But it's definitely interesting that, according to him, you had what he referred to as gung ho idiots at the CIA pro councils, basically trying to get him to do something that not even the D.C.I. wanted.
So that's that's an interesting thing.
This interesting thing about Haddon and the fact that, again, nobody did any obituaries except for one local newspaper was the fact that he was pretty vocal.
It's not like there isn't a track record in LexisNexis that any journalist could have grabbed.
He had this extensive interview with the BBC about this entire theft of uranium.
And he never he never equivocated.
He never backed down about his belief based on thousands of CIA documents which have never been released about how the same team that had nabbed Eichmann also nabbed all of this uranium.
And the record is clear.
There are actual letters which have been released showing the team going into the plant at the invitation of its of its operator when during the year of the highest loss.
So it was interesting that he was so candid and so dismissive of the Israelis comparing, you know, lifting all of this uranium as a much easier task than lifting the Nazi war criminal from the streets of Buenos Aires.
And he was also didn't share much love with them.
He mentioned them as a special case that, you know, he called them they can go out and murder people and do all sorts of things we can't do.
They get a lot done.
And then he complained about their intelligence saying Israeli intelligence is our main source of intelligence unexamined.
And that's another problem.
So I found it oddly echoing a lot of the things that have come out in in Jeff Stein's Newsweek profiles that have been, you know, circulating over the last couple of weeks about how this mistrust, this ongoing espionage, how it's affecting this drive to have visa free entry and things like that.
It seems as though that the basic sense haven't hasn't changed very much.
So but, you know, comparing that to all of these loving biographies of one of the operatives who penetrated the plant, which is Abraham Bender, who changed his name to Abraham Shalom, is a real interesting thing, because these same American journalists who could do a credible job or could have done a credible job on what was essentially Bender's counterparts, if you look at the relative size of each country and its bureaucracies, they just neglected to do that.
You've got, you know, basically, behind the paywall over at the Jerusalem Post, there's a recent piece by their top national defense writer, Yossi Melman, basically admitting the truth of all of the nuclear diversions, including NUMEC.
But, you know, it's just the fact that there's all of this fawning obituary and homages to this Shin Bet operative and John Haddon, the guy who basically exposed him publicly in the media, is utterly ignored is just astounding.
But unfortunately, it's kind of typical.
It's not something that, you know, readers of anti-war or other alternative news sites wouldn't expect.
Well, yeah, I mean, that's true.
But it's the public narrative that really matters, you know, the one that gets across there.
And now, so it's interesting that it's the same guy who was he was the first to out what was going on at the NUMEC facility.
Is that right?
He was.
There were two CIA officials who came out publicly.
One was Carl Duckett, who is the director of operations, who told the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that it was the CIA's belief that a diversion had occurred.
And John Haddon was the other one who was the CIA Tel Aviv station chief.
And presumably he would have been in charge of some of the sampling that took place outside of Dimona, which revealed the presence of weapons grade uranium that matched the same signature of what was being given to this NUMEC facility to process in the submarine fuel.
So he was unequivocal in his condemnation of that when when he discussed it with the press.
The authority of these two insiders at the same time that the CIA, they were leaving the CIA and at the same time the CIA was and still does.
It's fighting never to release any of its own multitude of files on the incident, but their credibility really helps carry this to a head in 1978, 1979, as the Carter administration finally passed information to the attorney general and said, you know, basically, we've either got to prosecute this or let it go because now the statute of limitations is running out.
So he played a role in underscoring the facts that something bad had happened just by his willingness to go public about it.
And now Zalman Shapiro still just lives in Philadelphia, is that right?
Yeah, he's not in trouble.
He's still.
No, he's not in trouble.
He's not worried.
He's still in Pittsburgh.
Every once in a while, an intrepid reporter will call him up and say, OK, Zal, please, let's just, you know, let's admit everything.
Why don't you tell your real story?
Kind of the way Arnon Milchan recently admitted that he was also a nuclear spy.
Yeah.
Don't worry.
You have complete impunity.
I mean, immunity.
Just go ahead and.
Well, you can you can pretty much say that.
Yeah.
We're out of time, Grant.
We got to run.
Thank you, though, very much.
Again, check out Grant today at Antiwar dot com.
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