[media-dakwah] Britain's dirty secret

Fri, 12 May 2006 20:15:51 -0700


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bismi-lLahi-rRahmani-rRahiem
In the Name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful


=== News Update ===

Britain's dirty secret
Cover story
Meirion Jones
Monday 13th March 2006


Exculsive - Secret papers show how Britain helped Israel make the A-bomb in
the 1960s, supplying tons of vital chemicals including plutonium and
uranium. And it looks as though Harold Wilson and his ministers knew
nothing about it. By Meirion Jones

Mirage jets swoop from the sky to destroy the Egyptian air force before
breakfast; tanks race across the desert to the Suez Canal; Moshe Dayan, the
defence minister, poses with eyepatch after the Jerusalem brigade has
fought its way into the Old City. These are the heroic images of the Six
Day War and they defined Israeli daring: here was a people who, it seemed,
risked everything on a throw of the dice. Years later the world discovered
that there was an insurance policy.

They had a secret weapon - two, to be precise. In the weeks before Israel
took on the Arab world in June 1967 it put together a pair of crude nuclear
bombs, just in case things didn't go as planned. Making them required not
only Israeli ingenuity but also plenty of help from abroad. It has been
known for some time that the French helped build Israel's reactor and
reprocessing plant at Dimona, but over the past year our research team at
BBC Newsnight has unearthed something no less astonishing and much closer
to home - top-secret files which show how Britain helped Israel get the
atomic bomb.

We can reveal that while Harold Wilson was prime minister the UK supplied
Israel with small quantities of plutonium despite a warning from British
intelligence that it might "make a material contribution to an Israeli
weapons programme". This, by enabling Israel to study the properties of
plutonium before its own supplies came on line, could have taken months off
the time it needed to make a weapon. Britain also sold Israel a whole range
of other exotic chemicals, including uranium-235, beryllium and lithium-6,
which are used in atom bombs and even hydrogen bombs. And in Harold
Macmillan's time we supplied the heavy water that allowed Israel to start
up its own plutonium production facility at Dimona - heavy water that
British intelligence estimated would enable Israel to make "six nuclear
weapons a year".

After we exposed the sale of the heavy water on Newsnight last August, the
government assured the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that all
Britain did was sell some heavy water back to Norway. Using the Freedom of
Information Act, we have now obtained previously top-secret papers which
show not only that Norway was a mere cover for the Israel deal, but that
Britain made hundreds of other secret shipments of nuclear materials to
Israel in the 1950s and 1960s.

Tony Benn became technology minister in 1966, while the plutonium deal was
going through. Though the nuclear industry was part of his brief, nobody
told him we were exporting atomic energy materials to Israel. "I'm not only
surprised," he says, "I'm shocked." Neither he nor his predecessor Frank
Cousins agreed to the sales, he insists, and though he always suspected
civil servants of doing deals behind his back, "it never occurred to me
they would authorise something so totally against the policy of the
government".

The documentary evidence is backed by eyewitness testimony. Back in August
1960, when covert photographs of a mysterious site at Dimona in Israel
arrived at Defence Intelligence Staff (DIS) in Whitehall, a brilliant
analyst called Peter Kelly saw immediately that they showed a secret
nuclear reactor. Today Kelly, physically frail but mentally acute, lives in
retirement on the south coast, and as he leafs through the "UK Eyes Only"
reports he wrote about Israel for MI5 and MI6, he smiles. "I was quite
perceptive," he says. Kelly recognised that the Dimona reactor was a French
design, and he very soon discovered where the heavy water needed to operate
it had come from. When we explain that the government has told the IAEA
that Britain thought it was selling the heavy water to Norway he laughs
heartily.

What really happened was this: Britain had bought the heavy water from
Norsk Hydro in Norway for its nuclear weapons programme, but found it was
surplus to requirements and decided to sell. An arrangement was indeed made
with a Norwegian company, Noratom, but crucially the papers show that
Noratom was not the true buyer: the firm agreed to broker a deal with
Israel in return for a 2 per cent commission. Israel paid the top price -
£1m - to avoid having to give guarantees that the material would not be
used to make nuclear weapons, but the papers leave no doubt that Britain
knew all along that Israel wanted the heavy water "to produce plutonium".
Kelly discovered that a charade was played out, with British and Israeli
delegations sitting in adjacent rooms while Noratom ferried contracts
between them to maintain the fiction that Britain had not done the deal
with Israel.

The transaction was signed off for the Foreign Office by Donald Cape, whose
job it was to make sure we didn't export materials that would help other
countries get the atom bomb. He felt it would be "overzealous" to demand
safeguards to prevent Israel using the chemical in weapons production. Cape
is 82 now, tall, clear-headed and living in Surrey. He told us the deal was
done because "nobody suspected the Israelis hoped to manufacture nuclear
weapons", but his own declassified letters from March 1959 suggest
otherwise. They show, for example, that the Foreign Office knew Israel had
pulled out of a deal to buy uranium from South Africa when Pretoria asked
for safeguards to prevent it being used for making nuclear weapons. It also
knew the CIA was warning that "the Israelis must be expected to try and
establish a nuclear weapons programme". Just weeks later, however, Britain
started shipping heavy water direct to Israel: the first shipment left in
June 1959 and the second in June 1960.

There was another problem: the Americans. There was no US-Israeli alliance
in those days and Washington was determined to prevent nuclear weapons
proliferation. If Britain told the Americans about the Israeli deal they
would stop it. Donald Cape decided on discretion: "I would rather not tell
the Americans." When Newsnight told Robert McNamara - John F Ken-nedy's
defence secretary - about this he was amazed. "The fact Israel was trying
to develop a nuclear bomb should not have come as a surprise, but that
Britain should have supplied it with heavy water was indeed a surprise to
me," he said.

Kelly's reports for the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) on "secret
atomic activities in Israel" show that Britain's defence and espionage
establishment had no doubt about what was going on in Israel. Kelly wrote
of underground galleries at the Dimona complex; there were such galleries.
He correctly described the French role in the project. He identified the
importance of the heavy water: with 20 tons of this material, he estimated,
Israel could have a reactor capable of producing "significant quantities of
plutonium". British intelligence also knew about the reprocessing facility
at Dimona and stated: "The separation of plutonium can only mean that
Israel intends to produce nuclear weapons." Kelly even discovered that an
Israeli observer had been allowed to watch one of the first French nuclear
tests in Algeria.

Kelly and his colleagues, however, found their views were being challenged.
Chief of the challengers was Michael Israel Michaels (such was his middle
name, literally), who was a senior official at the science ministry under
Lord Hailsham during the Macmillan government, and went on to serve at the
technology ministry under Benn. He was also Britain's representative at the
IAEA.

In 1961 Michaels was invited to Israel by the Israeli nuclear chief Ernst
David Bergmann, and while there was given VIP treatment. He met not only
Bergmann but Shimon Peres, the deputy defence minister, and David
Ben-Gurion, the prime minister - the three fathers of the Israeli atomic
bomb. Peter Kelly had warned his superiors that Israel might use the
Michaels trip as part of a disinformation campaign to show "everything is
above board", and this is what appears to have happened. Michaels's report
gave Israel the all-clear, and he handed it to Hailsham at an important
moment, two days before Ben-Gurion met Macmillan at Downing Street. Kelly
later took the report apart line by line and concluded by offering his own
prediction that Israel might have a "deliverable warhead" by 1967.

In 1962 the Dimona reactor started operating (thanks to the heavy water
Britain had delivered), yet Michaels continued to protest Israel's
innocence. The Israelis, meanwhile, were allowing the US to make inspection
visits to Dimona once a year to demonstrate that it was not being used for
military purposes, but Kelly saw that this, too, was a con. The tours were
"heavily stage managed", he wrote in 1963, and "important developments were
concealed". He was right: we now know that false walls screened parts of
the plant from the inspectors.

Three years later, at the beginning of 1966, something extraordinary
happened. The UK Atomic Energy Authority made what it called a "pretty
harmless request" to the government: it wanted to export ten milligrams of
plutonium to Israel. The Ministry of Defence strongly objected, with
Defence Intelligence (Kelly's department) arguing that the sale might have
"significant military value". The Foreign Office duly blocked it, ruling:
"It is HMG's policy not to do anything which would assist Israel in the
production of nuclear weapons."

Michaels was furious. He wrote "to protest strongly" against the decision,
saying that small quantities of plutonium were not important and anyhow if
we didn't sell it to the Israelis someone else would. Michaels could be a
bulldozer - he was short and bald, described as pugnacious and hard-headed
by colleagues - and he won his battle. Eventually the Foreign Office caved
in and the sale went ahead.

What is most surprising about the position adopted by Michaels is that, as
the new documents show, a few years earlier he had taken the direct
opposite view of the value of small quantities of plutonium. In 1961 he
received a JIC report suggesting that Israel would take at least three
years to make enough plutonium and then another six months to work out how
to make a bomb. In the margin beside the claim about the six months he
wrote: "This surely is an understatement if the Israelis have no plutonium
on which to experiment in advance." Then it occurred to him that a friendly
power might give Israel a sample of plutonium to speed up the process:
"Perhaps the French have supplied a small quantity for experimental
purposes as we did to the French in like circumstances some years ago" (see
panel, above). What this shows is that Michaels, in the full knowledge of
how useful it could be for weapons development, went on to persuade the
British government to sell Israel a sample of plutonium.

Today, Tony Benn can hardly believe that Michaels never referred the
nuclear sales to him. Going through his diaries, Benn finds dozens of
references to meetings with Michaels which show that he didn't trust him
even then. "Michaels lied to me. I learned by bitter experience that the
nuclear industry lied to me again and again." Kelly believes that Michaels
knew all along what Israel was doing, but since he died in 1992 we can't
ask him. According to his son Chris, after Michaels retired from the IAEA
in 1971 the Israelis found him a job in London for a couple of years.

The atomic files give details of hundreds more nuclear deals with Israel.
Many are small orders for compounds of uranium, beryllium and tritium, as
well as other materials that can be used for both innocent and military
purposes. In November 1959 someone at the Foreign Office allowed through
the export of a small quantity of uranium-235 to Israel, apparently without
realising that it was a core nuclear explosive material just like plutonium.

Some materials may have been for advanced bombs. In 1966 UKAEA supplied
Israel with 1.25 grams of almost pure lithium-6. When combined with
deuterium, this material provides the fusion fuel for hydrogen bombs.
Britain also supplied two tons of unenriched lithium, from which lithium-6
is extracted - enough for several hydrogen bombs. Deuterium, incidentally,
is normally extracted from heavy water, which, of course, Britain had
already shipped to Israel.

Throughout this period, Defence Intelligence repeatedly complained that
Israel was the only country getting nuclear export licences "on the basis
of the meaningless phrase 'scientific and research purposes'". The
Department of Trade tried to exempt Israeli deals completely on the grounds
that these were government-to-government transactions, but DIS was
outraged, saying such deals were meant only for "people like most of our
Nato partners who can be trusted . . . Israel however is a very different
kettle of fish." In August 1966 the Israeli armed forces ordered advanced
radiation dosimeters. The Foreign Office said yes and overruled the strong
objections of the British MoD that they were obviously for use by troops.
DIS wanted to know why Israel was always given special treatment, adding:
"We feel quite strongly about all this."

Tony Benn wonders whether these deals could have gone ahead without the
knowledge of the British prime ministers of the time, Macmillan, Sir Alec
Douglas-Home and Wilson. The evidence is unclear. The newly declassified
papers show that in 1958 a member of the board of UKAEA said he was going
to refer the heavy-water deal to the authority's executive, which reported
directly to Macmillan, but there is no record that this happened. We know
that Lord Hailsham learned about the heavy-water deal after it had gone
through and concluded that Israel was "preparing for a weapons programme".

Benn's initial reaction to whether Wilson knew about the atomic exports to
Israel was that it was "inconceivable". Then he hesitated, observing,
"Harold was sympathetic to Israel," but concluded that no, he probably did
not know. Benn believes that the exports were probably pushed through by
civil servants working with the nuclear industry.

There was no plausible civilian use for heavy water, plutonium, U235,
highly enriched lithium and many of the other materials shipped to Israel.
The heavy water allowed Israel to fire up Dimona and produce the plutonium
that still sits in Israel's missile warheads today. The small sample of
plutonium could have shaved months off the development time of the Israeli
atomic bomb in the run-up to the Six Day War.

In a letter this year to Sir Menzies Campbell, the Foreign Office minister
Kim Howells has quietly conceded Britain knew the heavy water was going to
Israel. He has yet to find time to tell the IAEA that, or indeed to tell it
about the plutonium or the uranium-235 or the enriched lithium. Howells and
his boss, Jack Straw, are too busy telling the IAEA about the dangers of
nuclear proliferation in another corner of the Middle East.

Meirion Jones produced Michael Crick's report for Newsnight (BBC2) on the
Israeli nuclear sales, which is broadcast on 9 March


How we helped the French

In May 1954 the French were fighting and losing their colonial war against
Ho Chi Minh's armies in Vietnam. At home they were slowly establishing a
nuclear infrastructure, but the setbacks in Indochina convinced some that
they needed the atomic bomb and they needed it quickly.

On 6 May, therefore, as the final battle at Dien Bien Phu neared its
climax, France's nuclear bosses sent a request to the chairman of the
British Atomic Energy Authority. It was a shopping list of items that would
help them build nuclear weapons, including a sample quantity of plutonium
"so we can take the steps preparatory to the utilisation of our own
plutonium". Britain knew about these things: it had exploded its own bomb
less than two years earlier.

Before the letter even arrived the French had lost the battle and the war.
Later that year the French prime minister, Pierre Mendes France, made the
formal decision to build the atomic bomb. It took another year to negotiate
the deal, but in the end Britain agreed to supply nuclear materials,
including enriched uranium. Among the most important parts of the agreement
was an arrangement for the British to check the blueprints and construction
of French plutonium production reactors.

According to one source, this not only helped the French get their military
plutonium reactor at Marcoule into operation quickly but it also averted a
disaster, for the British found defects which could have caused a
catastrophic explosion at the Rhone Valley site. The same source says that
when Charles de Gaulle came to power in 1958 he personally thanked Harold
Macmillan for the team's work.

There remained France's request for plutonium. In 1955 Britain agreed to
export ten grams but "we would not tell the US that we were going to give
the French plutonium nor about any similar cases". France exploded its
first atomic bomb in 1960.

source:
http://www.newstatesman.com/200603130011

===


-muslim voice-
______________________________________
BECAUSE YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO KNOW 

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