US Charity Secretly Funds Israeli Nukes
Weizmann and NUMEC place US in violation of Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty
by Grant Smith, May 18, 2012
Newly declassified FBI files are shining an inconvenient light on Israel’s
nuclear weaponization
research program and how it has been secretly funded from the United
States. Iranian negotiations with the UN Security Council resume on May
23 in Baghdad following initial sessions in Istanbul. The core issue is
whether Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) signatory Iran will agree to
abandon uranium enrichment and open its hardened facilities to more
intrusive international inspections. Israel and its western lobbying
organizations have long insisted — with little concrete proof — that
Iran has a clandestine weaponization program. The American Israel Public
Affairs Committee is diligently setting out legislative tripwires for mandatory
US military attacks if Iran fails to abandon its program. Yet the brazen
activities of the Weizmann Institute of Science now publicly documented by the
FBI reveal violations of the core principle of the
NPT. On April 24, 2012 the FBI released 159 pages detailing a secret
1992 counterespionage investigation into the Weizmann Institute of
Science of Rehovot, Israel. The previously unreleased files detail not
only how Israel’s nuclear fundraising and influence network has pushed
the US out of compliance with the NPT, but also how the US government
has continually missed opportunities to take timely and warranted law
enforcement action.
In October of 1992 military personnel at the Yuma Proving Ground,
which tests nearly every significant US ground combat weapons system,
detected a University of Buffalo computer system user penetrating their
secure computer network via New Mexico State University. A senior
majoring in Chemical Engineering hacked the UB system to obtain
high-level graduate student access codes. Soon after the BU hacking
incident "computers from the Weizmann Institute for Science accessed
computers from NM SU to penetrate computers at YPG" using the stolen
access codes. FBI investigators suspected the BU student, arrested by
Amherst Town police on October 8, 1992, passed the secret access codes
to Weizmann.
In January of 1993 the FBI interviewed UB graduate students whose
accounts had been misappropriated by the hacker. The FBI began to
research the student’s connection to other hackers in Texas and Hawaii
and his "possible contact/association with the Weizmann Institute of
Rehovot, Israel." Investigators also dialed up Lexis-Nexis for more
background on Weizmann. Among their first hits was a 1972 New York
Times article recording Soviet charges that Weizmann was nothing more than a
front
for Israeli nuclear weapons research. Interest piqued, the FBI amassed a
lengthy public source file (PDF) on Weizmann.
They discovered that the Weizmann Institute launched operations at
the close of WWII under the direction of Israeli nuclear research
pioneer Ernst David Bergmann. It was named after famed chemist Chaim
Weizmann, a Russian who immigrated to the UK and revolutionized the
production of acetone needed for WWI gunpowder production. The Zionist
activist lobbied and charmed Lord Balfour to win the creation of a Jewish state
in Palestine and became Israel’s first president in 1949.
The FBI noted the Weizmann Institute had "’an American Committee for
the Weizmann Institute’ which operates in the United States from New
York City, Chicago, and possibly other metropolitan cities. The
Committee engages in fund-raising, hosts lectures on topics of interest
and engages in public relations on behalf of the Weizmann Institute."
The FBI Counter-Intelligence division, after reviewing the public and
private records of its key officials and activities, submitted a frank
written assessment. "CI-3B believes that the Weizmann Institute is an
academic organization which conducts research in high-technology issue
areas, including theoretical aspects of nuclear and conventional weapons
development."
On March 8, 1993 the Assistant District Attorney of Erie County
reduced the unnamed BU hacker "misuse of a computer" charge to
"disorderly conduct," fined him $145 and sentenced him to 40 hours of
community service. BU college officials were not "overly anxious" to
have their student charged of an actual crime, including possible
espionage with Weizmann, rather than a mere campus computer access
violation. The FBI continued its Weizmann Institute spy network
investigation, obtaining a Grand Jury subpoena on March 19, 1993 served
on an unnamed suspect at his place of business. The Counter Intelligence
Division obtained logs of Yuma Proving Ground data that may have been
passed to Weizmann. Late in 1994 the investigation was closed due to the
"rudimentary" level of the "computer cracker" intrusion, which had
already been successfully prosecuted. The "Weizmann Espionage" case
officially closed.
In hindsight, what the FBI uncovered in the 1990′s about the Weizmann Institute
clearly documents that it was both involved in nuclear
weapons development and fundraising through a US non-profit charity.
That pile of evidence has only deepened in intervening years. If the FBI had
kept digging, and the Justice Department upheld its mandate, the
threat posed to US NPT compliance could have been mitigated by shutting
down the Weizmann Institute’s US fundraising arm over documented IRS
charitable purpose violations.
But Weizmann was no easy target. Since its very beginning, the
Weizmann Institute invested significant resources courting elite
collaborators and allies spread across US government and scientific
communities. Isidor Rabi worked on the Manhattan Project providing key
leadership developing America’s first atomic bombs alongside Robert
Oppenheimer at Los Alamos. When dispatched by a nervous JFK to visit
Dimona in 1961, Rabi stated unequivocally he had found "no evidence of
weapons related activity." The 2009 book Nuclear Express authors Thomas C. Reed
and Danny B. Stillman skeptically noted "Rabi was
already a member of the board of governors (and presumably on the
payroll) of Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science, the incubator of
most nuclear weapons work in Israel." Rabi’s misleading testimony took
some heat off Israel as it raced to finalize the Dimona reactor and
build an arsenal.
Abraham Feinberg, a
big-time Democratic Party operative and David Ben-Gurion’s designated
North American nuclear fund-raising coordinator, began courting Nobel
laureate Glenn T. Seaborg on behalf of the Weizmann Institute in the
early 1950′s. After becoming head of the Atomic Energy Commission during the
Kennedy administration, Seaborg played a key role in derailing
effective AEC and FBI criminal investigations into the Israeli theft of AEC
bomb-grade U-235 from the NUMEC facility in Apollo, Pennsylvania. Upon leaving
the AEC in
1971, Seaborg accepted Weizmann Institute chairman Abraham Feinberg’s
invitation (and an honorarium equivalent to nearly 10% of his annual
salary) to keynote the annual Waldorf Astoria event. Seaborg affirmed a
newly hatched US policy of covering-up Israel’s arsenal. "During my
tenure as Chairman of the AEC I was asked on numerous occasions whether I
thought Israel was a nuclear power — or less euphemistically — did she
have the bomb?…Now in retrospect, I often wished I had said, ‘Yes, she
is a nuclear power, the kind that knows of, and makes use of, the atom’s power
for peace.’" When the NUMEC uranium theft diversion investigation was
rejuvenated by Attorney General Edward Levi in 1976, Seaborg
refused to talk to FBI agents after DOE officials confirmed (PDF) to him that
traces of NUMEC U-235 had been recovered in Israel. But who actually hatched
the US presidential policy of covering up for Israel’s nukes?
During the Nixon administration, Henry Kissinger played a key role in crafting
the US policy of "nuclear ambiguity" designed to keep Israel’s nuclear arsenal
from ever becoming an "established international fact." In 1969 Kissinger
penned a classified strategy document (PDF), even noting the NUMEC uranium
diversion. "There is circumstantial
evidence that some fissionable material available for Israel’s weapons
development was illegally obtained from the United States by about
1965." But while Kissinger and Nixon had many good policy options that
could have reversed the Israeli nuclear program — especially by
withholding US military equipment — they chose none of them. Instead
they mandated that the US government would never officially acknowledge
Israel’s nuclear weapons, if Israel never tested them or made their
existence public. Shortly after stepping down as US Secretary of State
in 1977, Henry Kissinger graciously received a Weizmann Institute of
Science honorary degree as a "messenger of peace" and "principal
architect of international conciliation."
In 1987 the Department of Defense contracted a study titled "Critical
Technology Issues in Israel" led by Dr. Edwin S. Townsley, Deputy
Director of the Science and Technology Division of the Institute for
Defense Analyses. According to leaks to the press, the IDA study
documented Weizmann scientists developed a cutting-edge high-energy
physics and hydrodynamics program "needed for nuclear bomb design."
Weizmann also worked on advanced methods for enriching uranium to
weapons-grade through the use of lasers. As US foreign aid for Israeli
conventional weapons purchases and development surged, so too did
Weizmann’s US charitable funding for secret weapons development.
The American Committee for the Weizmann Institute added $50 million
in US tax-deductible charitable contributions to its half billion in net assets
according to its latest public tax filing. In 2009 it dispatched $43 million
for "program services" in the "Middle East and North Africa" at the Weizmann
Institute. AIPAC, which features Weizmann programs at its annual policy
events and is intertwined through chairman emeritus Robert Asher’s ties to both
organizations, would no doubt muster the full might of its 50-plus executive
committee organizations to derail any attempt at overdue regulation of Weizmann
during the current showdown with Iran.
Nobody was ever arrested for Atomic Energy Act violations over NUMEC
due to statute of limitations and investigatory obstructions. But
Weizmann and NUMEC are not dead historical issues under the Nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty. By knowingly turning a blind eye on Weizmann’s
assistance to Israel’s clandestine nuclear program and refusing to hold Israel
and its US collaborators responsible for NUMEC diversions, the
US has violated Article 1 of the NPT. It states, "Each nuclear-weapons
state undertakes not to transfer, to any recipient, nuclear weapons, or
other nuclear explosive devices, and not to assist any
non-nuclear-weapon state to manufacture or acquire such weapons or
devices." It is clear that the Justice Department did not follow the
Weizmann investigation through to its logical conclusion, even after
discovering the US weapons-funding front. The key conclusion of a
recently declassified General Accounting Office report is that the US
government similarly failed to properly investigate the NUMEC uranium
diversions. Taxpayers, who must pay extra revenue to the US Treasury because of
the Weizmann Institute’s unjustifiable tax deductible status, have long
been made involuntary accomplices in Middle East nuclear proliferation.
Given these tragic US failures to uphold rule of law, it is now time for the
International Atomic Energy Agency to take notice of the true
violators of the NPT.
Read more by Grant Smith
* Israel’s Nuclear Triggers – March 21st, 2012
* The Mossad Has Long Given Marching Orders to AIPAC – February 27th,
2012
* AIPAC Obtained Missile Secrets – February 5th, 2012
* AIPAC Tries to Bamboozle DC Appeals Court – January 10th, 2012
* AIPAC Economic Warfare Also Targets US – December 9th, 2011
http://original.antiwar.com/smith-grant/2012/05/17/us-charity-secretly-funds-israeli-nukes/
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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