All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our next guest on the show is Grant Smith.
He is the president of the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy.
That's I R M E P.org, IRMEP.org, and he's the author of Spy Trait, Visa Denied, Deadly Dogma, Foreign Agents, America's Defense Line, and more like that.
He writes also at antiwar.com and is America's number one extra super lucky wish expert on the machinations, in such detail, the history and current machinations of the Israel lobby and the Israeli government in the United States.
Welcome back to the show.
Grant, how are you doing?
Hey, Scott.
Great.
Thanks for having me on again.
Well, I'm really appreciative of you joining us today.
Let's see here.
Pollard espionage ring still unfolding.
And you go in here to a story we've talked about before, the theft of American weapons grade uranium, I think.
Was it weapons grade uranium?
90% enriched.
90% enriched from the United States by the Israelis or their agents in America.
And then somehow this has to do with the case of Jonathan Pollard, who is doing a life term in prison for documents that he stole and turned over to the Israeli government back in the 1980s.
So it's a complicated, but very important story.
So the floor is yours.
Please explain what's going on here.
Sure.
The story at antiwar is called Pollard espionage ring still unfolding.
And it's really the centerpiece of the of the essay is the declassified document, which has never been on the internet, but it's linked in that antiwar article, which is from an FBI report of an atomic energy commission correspondence in which they granted permission to four Israelis to visit this new mech nuclear plant in Pennsylvania on September 10 of 1968.
And so what's new about this document?
Well, it shows and reveals the true names, the actual names of an Israeli covert ops team.
Only one of these operatives was really identified ever in the press.
That was in 1986 when someone noticed that the Rafael Eaton, who said he was a scientist, had the same birthdate as Pollard's handler.
And so it became obvious at that point that there was, you know, a big espionage ring in The Washington Post wrote about it, you know, in that espionage ring that had been operative for many, many years and that Pollard was just one small cog in a larger machine.
But the rest of the team, the other three people, it's taken decades for them to be revealed.
But now they've all been identified.
And some of this legwork has been done by book authors and notably two nuclear regulatory commission former employees who wrote a stunning article about this last year, which hasn't gotten any attention.
But they identified one of the ops team members as an Israeli technical department secret services operative from 1960 to 1970.
That was Efrem Begin.
Efrem Hermani was a technical director in Israel's nuclear bomb project for Rafael and also had a role in the Timona nuclear weapons project, according to Avner Cohen.
Another operative, Efrem Bender, was a long-term Shin Bet operative and participated with Rafael Eaton as a right-hand man at overseas operations.
You know, now in 2010, 2011, we have a better picture of kind of some of the handlers and top operatives of this Israeli espionage network that ran Pollard.
And I think it's timely because this information, even though not many people are promoting it, coincides with this huge drive underway to free Jonathan Pollard.
And maybe we can talk about that a little bit.
Well, it doesn't just coincide with it, right?
This is the kind of Sun Tzu sort of thing when you're outnumbered attack.
So if all of a sudden there's more and more information coming out, creating a clearer and clearer picture of the Israeli spies who stole weapons grade uranium from the United States, then go ahead and crank up the calls for the release of Pollard and the nothing to see here, what he did didn't really hurt anybody anyway, kind of argument, if only just to change the subject.
Yeah, I see that mentality here because, you know, basically you kind of had this, uh, back in September, they tried to attach Pollard as part of a group of carrots to give to the Israelis for an illegal settlement freeze.
And then that collapsed.
And now there's the drive hauling out the big guns, you know, James Wolfe, Michael Mukasey, George Schultz, 38 members of Congress saying, Hey, there was never any crime committed here.
And, you know, that's taking it to its most narrow and ridiculous terms.
Of course there was a crime committed.
And, you know, what a lot of these politicians in the U.S. are arguing is that there was no harm committed.
But how can you say that when, of course, there have been credible charges that the U.S. network and the Soviet Union was rolled up, that substantial amounts of classified information found their way into the Soviet Union.
And then the other thing that the pro-Pollard release people focus on a lot is Caspar Weinberger's classified statement in which he gave to Judge Robinson, who then gave Pollard a life sentence.
But I think they're being deceptive when they do that because what Weinberger was saying in his declassified version of that was, you know, look at this guy.
He's not admitting guilt.
He's not trying to say in court that it's okay for Americans to spy for Israel and they shouldn't be punished.
He went on a media campaign with Wolf Blitzer in which he was comparing himself to an Israeli spy down behind enemy lines.
In the declassified version, Weinberger's basically saying to the judge, if you let Pollard go on easy terms, imagine what's going to happen to the entire U.S. government if this sort of thing is simply slapped on the wrist.
And that's, again, only taking the narrowest case and not saying, well, you know, it's not Pollard.
This is about an entire espionage network that has fundamentally altered the world balance of power.
It's created proliferation, since we know the Israelis tried to sell nuclear tipped Jericho missiles to South Africa during the apartheid regime.
And it's created this sort of sense of impunity, not only on the Israeli side, but on the side of some of the elite members of various lobbying organizations, which the New Mec plant owner was clearly a part of.
Well, so now, what all did the government know about the theft of this nuclear material at the time and the extent of the Israeli spy ring in America at the time?
And did the government at the time just sit back and let this happen, or were they in on it, or they couldn't do anything about it, or they did do something, but not enough, or what's the choice?
Well, all of the above.
When the, at first, the Atomic Energy Commission realized that New Mec was losing many, many, many, a much higher percentage of weapons-grade uranium than any plant in America.
And they focused in on it and conducted a bogus crackdown in which they interviewed employees, but they wouldn't take any notes, and they didn't want to be embarrassed, because they had a conflict of interest.
They were trying to promote Atoms for Peace and get nuclear businesses in America started, so they didn't want a crackdown on a plant.
They called in the FBI.
The FBI recommended, after very few years, they said, you know what?
Zalman Shapiro, the owner of the plant, is a national security risk.
All he does is travel to Israel and hang out with intelligence operatives in the United States.
He's up to something, so pull his security clearances and don't send any more nuclear material to New Mec.
Well, the Atomic Energy Commission would not do that for all of the conflicts that I just mentioned, and it really wasn't until the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which was, you know, a subsequent organization to the AEC in the mid-'70s, began trying to look at how to safeguard nuclear facilities from conversion, and they had a couple of disgruntled people investigating it at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and so to quell these disgruntled people, they invited the CIA, Carl Duckett, in to give a briefing, and Duckett said basically, yeah, uranium was stolen from the United States and given to Israel.
All right, now I'm sorry to have to stop you there, but it's a break and it's very rude.
It's Grant Smith from the Institute for Research in the Middle East Policy.
We'll be right back.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Grant F. Smith from the Institute for Research in the Middle Eastern Policy.
He's the author of a bunch of great books and is America's foremost expert on the Israel lobby, their history, and their power and influence in America.
His new one at AntiWar.com is called Pollard Espionage Rings Still Unfolding, and when the commercial break came up, Grant, you were talking about the FBI and CIA's investigation into the theft of weapons-grade uranium from the United States by the Israeli government there.
Right.
So you ask me, you know, what have they really done with this information?
The CIA has been very reluctant to release anything, although they have released verbally to various interested parties the fact that the signature of uranium found outside of Dimona matches the Portsmouth signature of New Mexico government-supplied uranium.
So what they have given out in dribs and drabs has more than confirmed the fact that a diversion took place.
And then the Government Accountability Office released to us last year a report about this incident, which kind of documents the cover-up more than anything.
But the cover-up, you know, makes it look as though basically none of these agencies responsible really wanted to deal with the consequences.
It makes them look, you know, wasteful, incapable, all of those bad things.
So, you know, the basic gist, though, I think is that, you know, we've now got a pretty good handle on the diversion, the amount of material stolen, what happened to it, you know, 43 years later.
And so given the fact that this ring is just the larger machine of which Pollard was involved, I would say that by 2029 we'll have a really good handle on everything that Pollard was involved in.
Right.
And that's amazing, this number 43 years, you know, whether it's finding out about the DOJ's pursuit of AIPAC's predecessor, whether it's finding out about the conventional arms smuggling network that was put up in the U.S. and then taken down with over 150 people involved on the West Coast alone and how all those prosecutions run along.
What we've found is that, you know, about 43 years after, you know, the crimes are successfully suppressed, treated with kid gloves, the U.S. public can find out about it.
Sounds like maybe you should go get your palm read.
Something's going on there.
Something's going on.
Spooky music time, mind calendars and stuff.
Now, all right, so now all this was taking place under tough old Lyndon Johnson, right?
What did he know?
When did he know it?
Well, Kissinger found out that, you know, someone just basically said it really looks like the Israelis got their uranium from us.
Kissinger was very much indebted to Abraham Feinberg, who David Ben-Gurion had designated as Israel's chief North American fundraiser for the Demona nuclear weapons project.
So, you know, what he knew about it, he had every financial incentive to, you know, not know anything and not do anything about it.
But he was out of power then, right?
Excuse me?
He was out of power at that point?
Or we're talking 1969 on, right, when he came in with Nixon again?
The diversion of uranium took place over a number of years with it peaking in 1968.
So when did the FBI and the CIA tell the administration in the White House that this was going on?
I don't have all of the FBI files yet.
I've got about a quarter of them, so I can't answer that question definitively.
Okay, but so far it seems like not until Nixon had been inaugurated.
Well, no, there would have been some alert, although you can't get anything from the Johnson files.
There is some still classified correspondence, which appears to be related to this, but I haven't gotten that from the Johnson Library yet, so we don't really know how much he knew.
But again, he had every incentive in Seymour Hersh's book, The Samson Option, kind of details how he had a real know-nothing attitude about Demona and about this sort of, you know, trafficking going on in his own country.
He just did not want to know about it.
All right, so now, well, here's maybe, I don't know if this is part of the larger narrative we're focusing on today, but it's an interesting point I want to nail down if I can, which is that Daniel Ellsberg says that Mordecai Venunu, the Israeli nuclear weapons whistleblower, told him that they have at least 600 nuclear weapons, including hydrogen thermonuclear bombs.
And I was wondering if you can verify that, because everybody else says, you know, between two or maybe four.
Yeah, that seems like it's a little bit much.
We had a conference on this topic, and afterwards there were a lot of people talking about, well, you know, nobody knows the number, but what would be a reasonable number, what would make sense for them to have?
And the number 150, you know, split between, you know, nuclear-tipped missiles and whatever they've got on their Dolphin-class submarines in terms of sea-launched missiles and then that sort of thing.
But that's the Venunu number, which you've quoted, seems like it might be a little much, given the cost of maintaining all of that and the fact that it's all in their black budget and they've got to keep it secret and command and control and all of that.
But, you know, what we're really trying to figure out with this, and it's still not entirely clear, the Department of Energy still has files which have been turning up in these FBI files saying, hey, you know, we're only talking about unclassified information about material shipments to Israel.
So, you know, there's still, I mean, there's still kind of a lingering question in my mind about whether there were some covert shipments that were actually authorized by the United States.
That would be interesting to find out if that were true.
But at any rate, they're not a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
They're a proliferation risk, since they have tried to sell these to foreign countries that they thought were their allies.
And there are no inspections of, you know, either their actual weapons or no public discussion about what their policy and posture is.
So, you know, to us it seems ridiculous, and I know to a lot of readers of antiwar.com, that there's so much focus on Iran, which is, you know, literally brimming with inspectors, directed and promoted by this country, which actually stole significant technologies and materials from the U.S. to put together their own arsenal, which is still secret.
Right, and not only that, of course, they insist, and we do, beat the Iranians over the head with the Non-Proliferation Treaty and all the technicalities under it, even though they're not in violation of any of that.
That's the cudgel that we use.
That's the excuse for laying the groundwork for war, as Hilary Mann-Leverett calls it.
It's all about their supposed violations of these agreements that they're not even in violation of, on behalf of Israel that's not even a member whatsoever.
Right, we'd have a much stronger case if the U.S. actually had a non-proliferation track record.
And, you know, if Congress were truly patriotic and wanted peace in the Middle East, they would open this can of worms.
And they've tried several times.
I mean, John Dingell tried to do it in the mid-70s with a whole panel on this subject.
And that's because, you know, shortly thereafter there was passage of the Glenn and Symington Amendments to the foreign aid legislation, which make it absolutely prohibited to send U.S. foreign aid to any country that's involved in developing or trafficking in clandestine nuclear materials.
You know, by opening this can of worms, you can see kind of how deceitful the Congress and the executive have been for all of these decades by violating the Symington and Glenn Amendments in continuing to send the lion's share of foreign aid to Israel.
You know, that's why it's very convenient not to release any more information about nuclear diversions or what the U.S. actually knows about Israel's nuclear weapons.
Because I'm sure the Central Intelligence Agency knows a great deal about them.
But it's one of those topics that they don't respond to Freedom of Information Act requests on.
Now, can you tell us the best information on who exactly is Megha?
Is that a group of people, and is it right in the speculation that I know of, which is that this must be a very high-level person to have the kind of access that he must have had in order to direct his underlings or their underlings to carry out the spying that they carried out?
It's still on my to-do list.
You'll be the first to know.
Yeah, well, I think that should be next, if you can get around to it.
Maybe there's a book in the offing there.
So that person is part of the mystery.
And so someday, hopefully not in 43 years, we'll know.
All right.
Well, we'll get back to that sooner or later.
With Grant F. Smith, thanks very much.
It's irmep.org.
See y'all tomorrow.
Thanks, guys.
