09/08/15 – Grant F. Smith – The Scott Horton Show

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Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, Scott Horton Show.
Hey, listen, everybody.
Grant Smith, he wrote a whole bunch of books, and they're all about the Israel lobby breaking America's laws, getting away with blue-bloody murder in this country, including stealing our weapons-grade uranium.
And he wrote the book on that.
Divert is the book on that.
There's 10 of them or something on every aspect of this.
And if you go to IRMEP.org, that's the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy, you'll see that what Grant does is he does the original reporting for you.
He's like Leopold, a FOIA ninja.
And he sits around forcing the government to cough up documents, proving his case all day, every day.
And that website is an absolute treasure trove.
You have no idea.
So please go and dig through it.
IRMEP.org.
And for example, he just got a bunch of new CIA files about Israel stealing American highly enriched weapons-grade uranium.
Is that correct, Grant?
That's correct.
Although the parts of it that signal that there was a cover-up of the key finding are clear.
So I wrote about the cover-up.
In terms of the actual CIA covert operation conducted by John Haddon, the CIA Station Chief, who was over there during the time period that this happened, that is still redacted in the documents.
But we have that from other agency sources, which are linked in the report that appears on antiwar.com called CIA Cover-Up Thwarted FBI's Nuclear Diversion Investigations.
So what we do know is that there are thousands of files.
They only gave us 130 pages.
But there are actually thousands of files as opposed to pages that existed at the FBI, excuse me, at the CIA, which was investigated by the Justice Department over this issue.
And so we put those out in a couple of releases here.
And the antiwar.com article in particular goes into the background of some of the executives who are all Zionist Organization of America executives, as well as running this plant, and sort of the history of NUMEC, which was the smuggling front.
All right.
Well, you know, I guess I grew up in the era right after Richard Nixon and all that.
So the common cliche is that the cover-up is what always gets you in trouble.
I mean, meaning government employees, they can do whatever they want, except cover up from other government employees, because then that gets them, you know, with that ambition check and ambition thing.
That's what gets them in trouble.
So, you know, maybe that's a good place to really take this story and run with it.
How dare the CIA thwart the FBI's enforcement of America's laws, Grant?
Well, you know, it's kind of funny, because putting something out with a headline CIA covers up something is kind of like almost something that you just breeze over, because it's like standard operating procedure.
Except they're not covering up for themselves here, or are they?
No, there's no indication.
And this has been a theory that's been put forth by some of the supporters of the theory that the U.S. government wanted Israel to have nuclear weapons and helped it by, you know, putting together a plant that polluted, you know, the environment instead of just taking uranium from the Department of Energy centrifuge sites and giving it to the Israelis.
They have this elaborate conspiracy theory that the U.S. government wanted Israel to have nuclear weapons, even though you can see in particular in some of the recent disclosures from the Nixon administration, they certainly didn't want Israel to go nuclear.
All right, well, hold it right there.
That's a perfect place to pick it up.
On the other side of this break, it's the great Grant F. Smith from EarMap.org.
We'll be right back.
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All right, guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Grant F. Smith from the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy, EarMap.org.
And his new piece at AntiWar.com is called CIA Cover-Up Thwarted FBI's Nuclear Diversion Investigations by Grant F. Smith.
Yeah, investigations, plural.
Two different FBI investigations thwarted by the CIA about the Israelis stealing weapons-grade uranium from the United States.
And where we left off, you were addressing the question of whether, in fact, President Johnson ordered the U.S. government, the national security state, to let the Iranians do this.
I think I asked you this as a devil's advocate type question on the show one time a couple of years back or so, or something.
Well, I mean, this is a pretty big operation.
Maybe the president said it was okay.
After all, talking about Lyndon Johnson, the guy who called the fighter jets back when they were going to try to protect the USS Liberty here, after all.
Why not?
But I think you have a couple of reasons in this article to believe why not, including you say, and you have the file here, the director of the CIA, Richard Helms, in 1968, was the one who requested the FBI investigation in the first place.
Right, right.
And there are some weasel words throughout the CIA, denials.
And there are many denials inside these files that they were in any way operationally involved in assisting a diversion.
They deny it.
The Directorate of Operations denies it.
And you do have this continuing cover-up.
I mean, Richard Helms did alert the Attorney General that they had every reason to believe, and they named the head of this plant, Zalman Shapiro, as the one that needed to be watched, every reason to believe that a diversion had taken place.
But that information never went to the FBI on order of various Central Intelligence Directors, including a former president by the name of George Herbert Walker Bush, but also other CIA directors as well.
So, I mean, just to put this in context, it's known, and the Department of Energy touted the fact, that they found uranium of a very unique type that was being supplied to NUMEC to make nuclear fuel for the Navy.
Very, very highly enriched uranium.
And they confronted a couple of former agency heads with it, but they never got around, in particular during the second FBI investigation, which was taking place while the statute of limitations was set to run out.
They never saw fit to tell the investigators about this.
And so the investigators were basically, as noted by the CIA, pleading for anything that they could use in their investigation.
In particular, they had a dual-track investigation going, which was validate the diversion and also figure out who was covering things up.
But, of course, they were talking to the agency that was covering things up, and they never got that very important evidence.
We know it was important, because when the Department of Energy confronted former Atomic Energy Commissioner Glenn Seaborg, who had a very negative role in the entire affair with this evidence, he then subsequently refused to talk to the FBI about any aspect of the NUMEC affair, as it's known.
So, you know, I would analogize it crudely as, hey, I know that Scott Horton's Chop Shop is a recipient of my 1963 Chevy Corvette, and someone tips off me to that fact.
I call the police, and they begin the investigation, but nobody ever says, hey, you know what, the engine block with matching numbers, I saw it in Scott's garage.
I mean, it's kind of that blatant.
I mean, they just never gave the lantern-jawed FBI gumshoes enough information to do a good job, and they were shaking people down.
They were talking to everybody at the end of the 70s to try and get information for an Atomic Energy Act prosecution, but it never happened.
And now, do you have any kind of, or did they ever have a legitimate estimate of how much uranium we're talking about was stolen here?
Yeah, the estimate, even after the plant was demolished, and even accounting for higher than normal operating losses, the official Department of Energy figure, which was compiled after painstaking analysis, was 337 kilograms, which is enough to make several nuclear devices.
And one of the reasons that the CIA was so sure that a diversion had taken place was that they discovered this weapons-grade uranium in Israel.
They knew at the time that Israel didn't have the capability, it didn't have the billion-dollar gaseous diffusion plants to make highly enriched uranium, so they knew it came from somewhere else.
And they were, of course, practicing atomic bombing raids with their U.S.-supplied jets, which gave every indication that they were practicing to use this type of weapon.
And so, there's a whole host of evidence that was collected about the fact that they mysteriously had this capability, which the CIA was primarily interested in documenting for their national intelligence estimate.
And as they repeated throughout the CIA documents that were released, they weren't in the law enforcement business.
Right.
Yeah, they're in the law-breaking business.
Well, yeah, to a certain extent, that's their job overseas, is to recruit people and do things that violate the sovereignty of other countries.
So, I don't – I think that more than anything, this particular release, to some extent, puts to rest the idea that the U.S. government wanted a diversion to take place.
And of course, NUMEC is always in the news.
And it's not in the news for this, which was, why was it ever built?
Why was a plant built, a shoddy steel mill converted into a nuclear reprocessing plant?
It's in the news because there's a half-billion-dollar cleanup that U.S. taxpayers are going to have to pay for.
And basically, as John Haddon of the CIA publicly stated, he was the former CIA station chief, that this was an Israeli job from the beginning.
This was just another smuggling front, of which there have been many, that was put together for the purpose of getting weapons-grade uranium to Israel.
It's left behind a huge mess.
And again, U.S. taxpayers, through the Army Corps of Engineers, are going to have to pay for the cleanup, even as the government fights tooth and nail, even since 1968, to prohibit Americans from knowing what really happens to this missing uranium.
Yeah.
Well, and I guess, doesn't that go back to Lyndon Johnson, where, come on, the Israeli government has a plot to go into the nuclear reprocessing business in Pennsylvania so that they can steal a bunch of weapons-grade uranium, and all from right under the nose of Uncle Sam without the national security state knowing enough about it to do anything about it the whole time?
It sounds crazy.
It sounds crazy.
Here's what's known for sure.
David Lowenthal, who set up the plant, was a smuggler during Israel's war of independence.
He had close contact, and known to the FBI eventually, that he had high Israeli intelligence agency contacts.
They obviously needed to convert the hexafluoride gas, which came in big canisters, into something more transportable, which was something NUMEC did, and then stuffed canisters of that into irradiators that then went to Israel.
And there's an eyewitness account from 1981 of a former employee saying that's exactly what happened.
Whether Johnson knew about it or not, we know Johnson was, you know, in the pocket of many Israel lobbyists like Abraham Feinberg, you know, receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash.
Yeah, he didn't allow any sort of response to the liberty, but the people in the CIA who would have known about a finding, again, you know, they're in the business of covering things up, but they do say to all these Congress people and other investigators, no, we had nothing to do with any operation.
So, you know, there are other smuggling fronts, MarTech, the Sonnenborn Institute, Materials for Palestine, all organizations that were set up decades earlier that were designed, and in fact did, funnel conventional weapons to Israel right under the nose of authorities.
And there was no presidential authorization of that either.
In fact, they were found to be violating the Arms Export Control Act, and several people were even prosecuted.
Yeah, you don't need the CIA to be behind it.
You just need the FBI to be in charge of stopping it.
There you go.
Well, yeah, but in this case, you know, the FBI did arrest some people, and some prosecutions were made in the convention smuggling.
Here, everyone who would have been threatened by the information, it seems, had access to it, but the ones who could have done anything about it prosecutorially were denied it.
All right, check him out, Grant Smith at antiwar.com, CIA cover-up thwarted, FBI's nuclear diversion investigations.
Thanks.
Thanks.
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