Rafi Eitan decided the time had come for him to go to Apollo. He put together a group of “inspectors.” These included two scientists from Dimona with specialized knowledge of reprocessing nuclear waste. Another team member was listed as a director of the “Department of Electronics, University of Tel Aviv, Israel.” There was no such post at the campus; the man was a LAKAM security officer whose task would be to try to discover a way of stealing fissionable waste from the plant. Hermoni was included: his job would be to point out the areas of poor security he had discovered during his previous visit. Rafi Eitan was traveling under his own name as a “scientific adviser to the office of the Prime Minister of Israel.”
The delegates were approved by the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv and visas were granted. Rafi Eitan had warned the team they could expect to be under FBI surveillance from the time they landed in New York. But, to his surprise, his experienced eyes saw no evidence of that.
The Israelis’ arrival in Apollo coincided with Shapiro’s return from another brainstorming tour of American university campuses, where he had been soliciting scientists who were “friendly” to Israel and would agree to go there and “solve its technical and scientific problems.” He would underwrite all their expenses and make up any deficit in their salaries.
Rafi Eitan and his team’s stay in Apollo was low-key. They took rooms in a motel and spent most of their time at the Numec plant learning the intricacies of converting highly enriched uranium from gaseous uranium hexafluoride. Shapiro explained that Atomic Energy Commission rules meant that Numec would have to pay penalties for any enriched material not accounted for, scaled at $10 a gram, $4,500 a pound.
Rafi Eitan and his spies left Apollo as quietly as they had come.
What followed can only be deduced from FBI reports, and even they leave tantalizing questions as to how much Salman Shapiro may have suspected was behind Rafi Eitan’s visit. An FBI report stated that a month after the Israelis had returned home, Numec became a partner with the Israeli government in a business involving what was described as “the pasteurization of food and the sterilization of medical samples by irradiation.”
Another FBI report complained that “with a warning notice posted on each container that it contained radioactive material, no one would open or examine them—and no one was prepared to let us do so.”
The reason for the refusal was because the Israeli embassy in Washington had made it clear to the State Department that if any attempt was made to inspect the containers, they would place them under diplomatic immunity. The State Department called the Justice Department and warned of the serious diplomatic consequences that would follow any breach of that immunity. All the thwarted FBI agents could do was watch the containers being loaded on to El Al cargo planes at Idlewild Airport.
Despite his best efforts, the CIA station chief in Tel Aviv, John Hadden, said he was unable to “firm up” that the containers were ending up in Dimona. The FBI logged nine shipments in the six months following Rafi Eitan’s visit. They noted that the containers arrived at dusk and left before dawn: all were sheathed with lead, needed to transport enriched uranium, and each container was stamped with a pre-addressed stencil in Hebrew giving Haifa as the final destination. On several occasions, agents saw “stovepipes”—storage containers for enriched uranium—being placed in steel cabinets at the Numec loading dock. Each stovepipe bore a number showing it had come from the company’s high-security vaults. But there was still nothing the FBI could do. An FBI memo spoke of “political pressure from State [Department] not to create a diplomatic incident.”
After ten months the shipments abruptly stopped. The FBI could only assume that sufficient quantities of fissionable material had by then reached Dimona. During the agency’s subsequent interviews, Shapiro denied he had supplied Israel with nuclear bomb-making material. The FBI said their check of company records showed there was a discrepancy in the amount of material reprocessed. Shapiro insisted the “most logical explanation” for any “lost” uranium was that it had seeped into the ground or had been “disposed of into the air.” All told, the missing material amounted to one hundred pounds. Shapiro was never charged with any crime.
In the years that followed, Rafi Eitan could be forgiven for thinking how easy it had become to steal fissionable materials after the collapse of the Soviet Union. An incident that took place at Sheremeteyevo Airport in Moscow on August 10, 1994, proved exactly that.
