Raid on the Sun(8)

The bomb factory’s existence would not be corroborated for another twenty years. But by the mid-sixties, reports of the reactor on the surface had made U.S. intelligence agencies suspicious. Early in 1965 the AEC and the CIA began rethinking the conventional wisdom concerning Dimona. After a decade of turning a blind eye on the somewhat troubling question of Israel’s real intentions regarding the ultimate use of its nuclear reactor, the Defense Information Agency (DIA), AEC, and CIA began anxiously speculating on the primary source of Israel’s U235 fuel—especially after two hundred pounds of enriched uranium shipped by Westinghouse Company and the U.S. Navy to a small Pennsylvania nuclear processing and fabrication firm called Nuclear Materials & Equipment Corporation turned up missing.

What flagged the attention of the AEC and CIA was the fact the firm’s founder and director, Zalman Shapiro, the American son of a rabbi and Holocaust survivor, was a well-known, outspoken supporter of the Jewish state as well as an active member in the Zionist Organization of America. Even more intriguing, Shapiro counted among his closest friends Ernst Bergmann, the nation’s leading nuclear scientist. After an investigation but without a lot of hard proof, the AEC charged that Shapiro’s company, NUMEC, had diverted the missing uranium to Israel and then attempted to bury the missing inventory in its convoluted bookkeeping procedures. Shapiro vehemently denied all the charges, as did Israel. The AEC, FBI, CIA, even Congress conducted a panoply of audits, reviews, and criminal investigations for ten years. But in the end the case came down to supposition and some suspicious transactions. No hard evidence was ever uncovered that NUMEC had diverted anything to Israel, much less U235. The lack of proof, however, did little to save Shapiro’s reputation. He lived out his life marked as a suspected agent for Israel.

The matter was soon officially forgotten. Whatever the truth, by the end of the decade, how Israel had attained enriched uranium was no longer of interest to anyone—except Saddam Hussein.



By 1971, Khidhir Hamza had been assigned to review and evaluate the history and operations of the Nuclear Research Center at al-Tuwaitha and to produce a definitive Atomic Energy Progress Report. Before long, Hamza found himself involved in every aspect of Atomic Energy’s business. What he discovered surprised him: for all Hussein’s obsession with control, it was clear that Iraq had been taken for a ride by the superpowers. In the early sixties, Iraq’s Atomic Energy (AE), under directions from Hussein, had purchased a small five-megawatt nuclear reactor from the Soviet union  . The sale was of little concern to the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) because the reactor was too small to produce weapons-grade uranium, which could then be used to create an atomic bomb. In fact, the Soviets had refused to sell Hussein anything larger than the five-megawatt reactor. Ironically, the Russians, unlike many of the West’s democracies, especially the aggressively competitive French, Germans, and Italians, turned out to be strict enforcers of the international nuclear nonproliferation treaties. However, seeing the perfect opportunity to make a good profit off of what they considered an unsophisticated and technologically impoverished Arab satellite state, the Soviets, in Hamza’s estimation, had put together a package of mostly outdated nuclear and power-generating equipment, including, of all things, a boiler dating back to the 1930s. Bizarrely, instead of fixing an exact price tag on the reactor and for all of its various facilities and equipment, the Soviet nuclear agency charged Iraq by the ton. Accordingly, the Russians heaped as much equipment onto the deal as they could, padding the service contract with scores of redundant engineers, technicians, and untrained hacks who collected large paychecks for doing virtually nothing.

Padding the payroll and shipping ancillary machinery was easy, since it was never clear even to Iraqi administrators what exactly the Nuclear Research Center was supposed to be doing. Sitting atop the second largest oil deposit in the world, Iraq was hardly in need of nuclear power to run its electrical plants. In recent years, in fact, Atomic Energy had been used mostly to screen Saddam’s dinner. Hussein demanded only the best of everything when it came to his personal comforts. The Iraqi leader had his food flown in fresh daily from Paris. On its sojourn to his state-of-the-art kitchens, the finest French beef, lamb, lobster, and shrimp were routed first to technicians at Atomic Energy, where the institute’s multimillion-dollar X-ray and chemical-processing machines were used to check the victuals for poisons or dangerous metals that could harm the Great Uncle, as Saddam had taken to being called by loyal party minions. At the slightest doubt, the suspect delicacy would be sloughed off to local markets or restaurants. One well-known story recounted by Hamza recalled a day when Saddam came down with diarrhea. A squad of security guards stormed into the palace kitchen and held the cooks for hours kneeling on the floor with gun barrels pressed to their heads until a doctor examined the leader and declared it a common virus.