• How Israel got away with stealing nuclear material from a Pennsylvania power plant in 1968 and why the U.S. government and the CIA turned a blind eye.
By John Friend —
A Washington, D.C. think tank has published 84 pages of once-secret information regarding Israel’s “illegal diversion” of weapons-grade nuclear material from a Pennsylvania power plant.
The Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy (IRmep) is a nonprofit organization based in our nation’s capital that specializes in United States-Middle East foreign policy. According to the group’s website, it focuses on “citizen access to initiatives of one of the most harmful forces driving policy formulation in the U.S. political process”—namely the powerful and wide-ranging network of pro-Israel organizations dominating the U.S. political process, policy making apparatus and mass media.
IRmep’s “Israel Lobby Archive” is perhaps the country’s most comprehensive collection of information relating to the long, sordid history of Israeli espionage, subversion, theft and intrigue directed against America—a history readers of AMERICAN FREE PRESS are all too familiar with, but one of which the average citizen is largely ignorant.
The previously classified documents detailing Israeli nuclear theft at the NUMEC [Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation] nuclear facility in Apollo, Pa. were released by the Interagency Security Classification Appeals Panel at IRmep’s request. The documents released include a 1968 letter from Richard Helms, then-director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), written to then-Attorney General Ramsey Clark, informing him about the Israeli theft of nuclear material from the NUMEC facility.
“It is critical for us to establish whether or not the Israelis now have the capability for fabricating nuclear weapons which might be employed in the Near East,” Helms wrote.
Other documents obtained by IRmep include a 1972 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) memorandum and a 1977 letter written by former President Jimmy Carter to National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski regarding the theft.
The documents obtained by IRmep show that the U.S. government knew Israel was stealing nuclear material for an illegal weapons program and did nothing to stop it.
“As the CIA was aware of the theft and law enforcement was subsequently involved, the unwillingness to go after the perpetrators even after the fact suggests that there was reluctance to go after a case involving Israel even though it damaged U.S. national security,” explained Philip Giraldi, the executive director of the Council for the National Interest and former CIA counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer. “It is a tribute to the power of Israel’s lobby inside the United States. No politician will challenge Israel directly on anything it does because of fear of being unelected next time around due to interference in the process from the lobby.”
Giraldi went on to highlight the damage done to American national security and international relations generally.
The nuclear theft and Israel’s clandestine nuclear weapons program “has enabled Israel to act with a free hand vis-à-vis its neighbors, which has had major consequences for its patron, the United States,” Giraldi stated. “Israel’s brutal occupation of parts of Lebanon and the Palestinian territories has been the fuel that has fed terrorism, and that terrorism has come home to the U.S.”
Israel is portrayed as “America’s greatest ally” when in reality the Jewish state illegally occupying Palestine has repeatedly attacked and subverted the U.S. through its fifth column of agents, partisans and assets embedded within the American political establishment, mass media and corporate world. American foreign and domestic policy are largely formulated and dictated by neocons and cultural Marxists with direct ties to the Zionist entity occupying Palestine, many of whom maintain dual American-Israeli citizenship. Israeli espionage directed against America is widespread and well-known, as the FBI has repeatedly documented.
“Israel spies on the U.S. across the board,” explained Giraldi. “Every U.S. administration since Lyndon Johnson should be held accountable for what is going on. The White House knows exactly what Israel has been doing but is afraid to act in spite of the constitutional responsibility to enforce the law. It is the longest running charade in history.”
John Friend is a writer who maintains a blog and hosts “The Realist Report” on the AFP Radio Network.
