Raid on the Sun(6)

Nasser had risen to the height of power in the Arab world by promising a day of reckoning with the “Zionist entity.” Playing the Cold War chessboard, he had allied Egypt with the Soviet union   and received huge shipments of military aid, modern artillery, MiGs, tanks, and training, making his army the largest in the region. Egypt had been girding for war for four years, forming military alliances with the other Arab nations. Now, in early 1956, Egyptian forces had amassed on the Sinai border across from Israel. But still the United States and Europe refused to act. Finally, fed up with Washington and convinced that Israel could count on no one but itself, Ben-Gurion called on Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and Ernst David Bergmann, Israel’s Oppenheimer, to fly secretly to Paris to request France’s help in developing a nuclear reactor. The Israeli leader had concluded that the only way to ensure Israel’s survival was by atomic bomb.

Six weeks after Peres left, in October, the war in the Suez broke out. Nasser continued to rattle sabers, moving infantry, tank companies, and Eygyptian MiGs far forward into the Suez Peninsula. Finally, he effectively declared war when he ordered a blockade of Israeli shipping in the Red Sea north of Sharm al-Sheikh at the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula. Aligning with Israel, France agreed to sell Israel the nuclear reactor, and in a secret agreement joined the British in a pact to reoccupy the Suez Canal, which had been ceded to Egypt. The plan called for Israel to attack Egypt, and then, as a ruse to restore order between the warring Israelis and Egyptians, Britain and France would intervene and reoccupy the canal. Right on cue, Israel unleashed its tank corps and quickly cut a devastating swath all the way to the canal. France and Britain deployed to invade and capture the Suez, but the Soviets, smelling out the plan, threatened to dispatch troops to reinforce Nasser. The United States and overwhelming international pressure brought Israel to a halt. Israel and Egypt suspended hostilities, and a United Nations force was decamped to ensure the neutrality of the Sinai Peninsula. Britain and France were sent packing from the Middle East, as it would turn out, for good. The balance of power between the Middle East and the European continent was irrevocably altered. But France was still on the hook for a nuclear reactor, the state-of-the-art EL 102, which could produce 24 million watts of thermal power and, at full capacity, twenty-two kilograms of enriched uranium a year, enough to make four bombs the size of the one dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.

Groundbreaking on the reactor commenced quietly, without public notice, early in 1958 on a remote, restricted patch of barren desert in Dimona, near the ancient city of Beersheba in the heart of the Negev. It would soon be the most important piece of real estate in Israel. For the next ten years, hundreds of French technicians, Israeli scientists, construction workers, thousands of tons of equipment, and an unending caravan of covered trucks and earthmoving tractors moved in and out of the tiny watering hole. Dozens of U-2 overflights had aroused deep suspicions within the Pentagon and the NSA about what the Israelis were up to, but in truth, most of the people in Defense and State, as well as CIA, were sympathetic to Israel, even if it wasn’t stated U.S. policy. Until there was confirmable proof, conventional wisdom said it was better to say nothing and wait. This cat and mouse game would continue for an entire decade.

By 1960, France’s new president, Charles de Gaulle, began to have second thoughts about his nation’s secret nuclear alliance with Israel. Effectively squeezed out of its onetime colonial playground in the Middle East, France was increasingly concerned about finding a cheap oil supply. De Gaulle, never overly warm to the Israeli state, leaned more and more toward the Arabs. He sent word to Ben-Gurion that Israel would have to reveal publicly that it had developed a nuclear reactor, or France would go ahead and divulge it. In December, Gaullists leaked the story of France’s construction of the Dimona reactor to London’s Daily Express anyway. Deeply hurt, Ben-Gurion was forced to reveal to the Knesset that Israel had constructed a nuclear research reactor in the Negev, but for purely peaceful means. To offset protests, Israel promised to allow inspection teams from the United States into Dimona to confirm that no weapons development was taking place.

A team of scientists and nuclear specialists from the Atomic Energy Commission (the precursor of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission) was duly sent to Israel. Climbing through the tunnels and excavations, the inspection-team members found no evidence that the reactor was being used to produce weapons. It was, just as the Israelis claimed, a twenty-four-megawatt research reactor. Everything was clean—in fact, incredibly clean, since some rooms showed evidence of fresh plaster and paint. What the American engineers and scientists did not know was that they were looking at a nuclear version of The Truman Show. On Ben-Gurion’s orders, Israeli engineers had constructed a false control room, replete with fake control panels, a jimmied computer, and needles and dials displaying phony readouts from a putative twenty-four-megawatt reactor. The technicians had practiced the charade for weeks, making sure everyone knew their part. There could be no mistakes. The inspection team, after all, was not stupid.