2019 U.S. Foreign Aid and the Israeli Nuclear Weapons Program

Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, May 2019, pp. 26-30, 68

Grant F. Smith

Grant F. Smith: I haven’t had a chance to introduce the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy, co-organizer of this conference. We’re an organization that began doing Middle East policy research in 2002. As part of that research, we did keep running into the Israel lobby and its multiple policies and programs.

So the Institute for Research has three core programs, many of which focus on the lobby. The first one of those programs is Freedom of Information Act [FOIA] requests. The Freedom of Information Act is in a period right now where any real bona fide effort is going to require a lawsuit to complete. We have multiple lawsuits going on at any single time, but the purpose of Freedom of Information Act lawsuits is really to ferret out information that the government has kept secret about Middle East policymaking that Americans should know.

So our second major program, as Delinda mentioned at the top of the hour, is our effort to do public opinion polling that asks, in many cases, questions that the mainstream pollsters, whether Gallup or Pew or Rasmussen, do not ask about U.S. Middle East policy. There’s a huge wide range of questions that they will never ask about U.S. foreign aid, about what they think about Middle East nuclear proliferation. So what we’ve done with our polling is—using the Google surveys platform, which is a representative polling process that costs money—attempt to ask questions and track Gallup, in particular, which has, even within the polling world, many polls about the Middle East that are extreme outliers with even other pollsters like Pew Research, but certainly with our polling.

Finally, we put together research reports and the data we’ve gathered through FOIA and polling results and other sources to publish policy research. It often appears online at Antiwar.com. It’s published by the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. And we think that this research that we’ve been performing has potential to reduce a lot of the enormous waste and misdirected efforts and huge opportunity costs that we’ve been paying as a nation.

So today, I’d like to talk about the Israeli nuclear weapons program. It’s a topic that is of interest because, back in the 1960s, as Professor Hixson mentioned this morning, the United States correctly opposed the Israelis going nuclear. Nevertheless, the U.S. effort to make non-proliferation a key policy goal was undermined—I call it supplanted.

So we’re going to go through a few details about that, because everybody in this room, everybody watching this in one way or another, has paid a price as U.S. obligations under treaty and our own Arms Export Control Act have been systematically undermined for 50 years. And so, what we need to understand is that the root cause of this undermining leads directly to the Israel lobby. They want you to pay. They want you to continue paying. But they would prefer that you do not know what is going on, so it can continue indefinitely.

I’m going to basically base a lot of the points I’m making on three concurrent lawsuits that are happening right now in DC District Court. One of them is about obtaining the entire black budget from U.S. foreign aid to Israel which is very large, but never disclosed. The other is to expose a new gag order that came out in 2012 which bans all U.S. federal workers and contractors from discussing the Israeli nuclear weapons program. Finally, a newly unearthed part of nuclear ambiguity policy, which are secret letters signed by presidents promising, in effect, to violate NPT and our arms export control regime.

Professor Hixson already mentioned this this morning: This era in the 1960s, at the end of it, where the policy goals of the entire U.S. policymaking community for the Israeli nuclear weapons program were to compel Israel to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, to uphold U.S. obligations under that treaty, withhold the sale of nuclear delivery-capable Phantom jets from Israel that they wanted to buy, and compel the Israelis to dismantle their Dimona nuclear weapons facility. Their consensus, as stated in a memo compiled by National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, was to avert a disaster in terms of the peace process. They felt that nuclear weapons would “sharply reduce the chances for any peace settlement in the future”—and, boy, were they ever right.

Israeli policy goals were to buy those nuclear-capable jet fighters, to maintain their Dimona facility, and to get the United States to enter into an Israeli-contrived policy of forever being ambiguous about whether they did or did not have a nuclear weapons program.

And so, these two policy objectives were fundamentally opposed, and the United States decision factors really rotated around the Nixon assessment of the Israel lobby’s ability to mount pressure upon them. Henry Kissinger noted that if they made public the fact that they were going to base sales of these jets on the nuclear program, that an enormous pressure would be mounted on them by the lobby. Previous presidents, as Professor Hixson had alluded to, had already collapsed under this very same pressure, that they couldn’t pressure the Israelis without immediately having U.S.-based groups come to them and say, “you can’t do this.”

So, there was another consideration within the policy compilation which they all considered. This is something most Americans don’t know about, but there was concern because they knew that the Israelis had in fact stolen weapons-grade uranium from the United States beginning in about 1965 from a plant in Apollo, Pennsylvania. As Kissinger said, this is one program on which the Israelis have persistently deceived us, and may even have stolen from us. Subsequent document releases from the CIA and FBI leave no doubt about that. But what happened ultimately was that, with all these policy considerations out on the table, the Nixon administration nevertheless adopted an Israeli policy of nuclear ambiguity and sold the jets in a meeting with Golda Meir on Sept. 26, 1969. Ever since, United States presidents have, while in office, mostly abided by a policy of never confirming, denying, or talking about the Israeli nuclear weapons programs, just as most Israeli prime ministers do not.

But there were two senators who were not satisfied, and made some trouble for the CIA and the National Security Council. These were Sens. Stuart Symington and John Glenn. Although in numerous meetings with the Central Intelligence Agency they couldn’t compel any action on their part, or on the part of the NSC or anybody else, to do anything about the diversion, they did pass an amendment to the U.S. Foreign Assistance Act, which is now part of the Arms Export Control Act, which provides conditions that the U.S. has to follow if it ever wants to transfer foreign aid to a nuclear weapon state that has not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Nevertheless, the United States has never followed its own law.

So, from our standpoint as Freedom of Information Act users, we hit a wall every time we move to attempt to make the Central Intelligence Agency, the State Department or any other agency release information about the Israeli nuclear weapons program. The CIA has released things before: in 1974, they released a special national security estimate which leaves no doubt that they know the Israelis have nuclear weapons. The Department of Defense, after fighting us in court for half a year, released a very lengthy 1987 analysis of the Israeli nuclear development program, which included hydrogen bomb developments, which included using U.S. resources provided under Atoms for Peace for making nuclear weapons designs. So, the U.S. government can fight these things, but they’re [faced] with 50 years of history, 50 years of slip-ups and releasing information. There’s plenty of compelling evidence that we’ve been able to use to convince judges that, at this point, the only possible reason that they’re still maintaining a lot of this information under classification is that they don’t want anybody to come after them and challenge them on the laws and the treaty that they’re breaking.

So, nuclear ambiguity has been around for so long that it requires heavy maintenance in this day and age to maintain. New Yorker reporter Adam Entous wrote a stunning piece in June of 2018 in which he talked about a series of letters that the Israelis have been making presidents sign since Bill Clinton in 1993 until Donald Trump more recently, in which they promise in a letter, a secret letter, that they will not compel the Israelis to sign the NPT. They will not talk about Israel’s nuclear weapons in public. And, of course, the National Archives and Records Administration will and is fighting not to even confirm the existence of these letters. But it is clear that they are part of ambiguity maintenance.

This ambiguity maintenance has even taken another form, in which the Obama administration, after being very positive in talking about nuclear non-proliferation, in talking about a nuclear-weapons-free zone in the Middle East, finally buckled to pressure and not only signed the letter, but also passed a new classification guideline which says, essentially, that any government employee, any government contractor, that even so much as references information about the Israeli nuclear weapons program from the public domain will be fired, prosecuted, lose their security clearance or possibly much worse.

And this has already happened to one Department of Energy employee by the name of James Doyle, who used to work at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. James Doyle made the mistake of writing a single article called, “Why eliminate nuclear weapons?” in a magazine called Survival, the February/March edition from 2013. James Doyle wrote the following: “Nuclear weapons did not deter Egypt and Syria from attacking Israel in 1973, Argentina from attacking the British in the Falklands War or Iraq from attacking Israel in the 1991 Gulf War.” Clear reference to Israel’s nukes not being a great conventional deterrent, but a congressional staffer noticed that he had written this. That representative’s office contacted the Department of Energy, hugely dependent on Congress’ good graces for funding. They looked at the article, which they had already reviewed for classified information. Then they retroactively classified it, raided Doyle’s home, fired him, pulled his security clearances—and that’s how it works.

So, if we look at some of the costs of nuclear ambiguity policy, one way to do that is to look at all of the foreign aid that’s been given since Symington and Glenn first managed to pass their restrictions of foreign aid to non-NPT states. If you look at the aid figures—which are never given in inflation-adjusted terms—that foreign aid since 1949 has now surpassed $260.9 billion—and again, this does not include any of the black budget aid, which we still haven’t been able to release.

That’s far more than the United States spent rebuilding Europe under the Marshall Plan. It’s far more aid than given to any other foreign country. It’s interesting, then, to take a data cut of that aid and see that 85 percent of that foreign aid has been given to Israel since the Symington and Glenn amendments became law in 1976. So by law, none of that almost quarter-billion dollars should have been allowed absent some Arms Export Control Act compliance and absent some Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty compliance. If you look at how much aid has been given since President Clinton, President George W. Bush, President Obama, President Trump, acquiesced to signing new pledges to Israel to promise to ignore their weapons, to promise to ignore the NPT and U.S. law, the amount is $99.9 billion. Let’s round it up to a hundred.

Israel’s demands have another component. This, again, goes back to the concerns expressed in the report about adopting nuclear ambiguity in the first place. That is, the cleanup of the toxic waste site left by the plant that Henry Kissinger referred to. The Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation [NUMEC] was, as the CIA once said, an Israeli operation from the beginning. Yet because the NUMEC diversion information gathered by the CIA, gathered by the FBI, gathered by other parties, has never fully been released, the cleanup cost and the blame for this toxic waste left by this underfunded plant have been shifted on to other parties. The FBI has documents indicating that they know that underfunding and shoddy treatment of protocols on waste handling contributed to the toxic pollution in Apollo, Pennsylvania, because they had wiretaps on the plant owners talking about the results of the toxic spill in which they were sending unprotected workers to go make cleanups—but the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is estimating this $500 million toxic cleanup will have to be paid by U.S. taxpayers.

So, I think the story of nuclear ambiguity, the cost that it transfers to U.S. taxpayers, the pretty much illegitimate discussion that comes around nuclear non-proliferation in policy-making circles, can be traced back to this particular nuclear ambiguity policy. But what’s interesting about it is that it’s not unique. If you look at other policies, you can see a cycle at work: supplant, silence, and exploit.

Supplanting: devise an original or supplant a policy of the United States that benefits the United States with one that broadly benefits Israel is the supplantation stage. Silence: figure out a way to gag or prevent stakeholders or government employees, officials, contractors, from effectively communicating about the supplanted interest. And then exploit: compel the U.S. taxpayers, voters, businesses, others, to provide resources for Israel and the lobby rather than the common good.

So, this is taking place and has taken place in other arenas. Ali Abunimah mentioned that there was an organization back in the 1960s called the American Zionist Council which was, in fact, ordered to register as an Israeli foreign agent because it received funding from Israel to start up and conduct public relations. But that same organization—along with pressure on the Justice Department—managed to supplant the U.S. Foreign Agents Registration Act and their desire to have open information on the money coming in and the policies being enacted, and silenced the Justice Department through pure internal pressure into not even releasing the registration that was finally compelled in 1962. The Justice Department held on to it until 2010.

But there’s a clear set of documents that shows that AIPAC was originally ordered, when it was operating as an unincorporated organization inside the AZC, to comply with the FARA order and it never did. The Justice Department never did anything about it, and they won’t even talk about it. So that exploitation is that foreign agent activities immediately resumed for the Israeli government when AIPAC incorporated itself in 1963, just six weeks after that order. AZC’s gone, AIPAC’s been with us ever since.

The First Amendment—and this is something that we’ll be talking about more this afternoon, supplanting and conditioning the First Amendment where it pertains to people wanting to boycott Israel over its human rights issues. The silence part of the cycle is free speech activities, seeking peaceful change through nonviolent protests. People are now being asked to sign waivers and pledges that they will not engage in that speech activity. The exploitation basically is that if you don’t sign as a government employee or contractor in many states, now, a pledge saying that you won’t boycott Israel, then all those revenues and opportunities are going to go to others more willing to prioritize Israel’s policy objectives.

This has happened in weapons smuggling. Telogy is a recent example of Tektronix oscilloscopes being shipped to Israel for their nuclear weapons program. They were able to simply get a slap on the wrist for an export violation. But it’s been going on since the very first Neutrality Act violations in the 1940s, where there was a major Israeli weapon smuggling ring in the United State. Some people called it the Haganah smuggling ring, others call it other things, but it was able to move a large number of conventional weapons out of this country to Israel with almost no criminal prosecutions.

What I’m hoping our friends from the Virginia Coalition for Human Rights will talk about this afternoon is another case of supplant, silence, and exploit called the replacing textbook histories in the K-12 education system with what’s essentially the Israeli government line on territory, settlements and other things, in order to spread a line of government propaganda, basically through the textbooks. So I’m not going into that. But I can express some hope in the sense that Americans are increasingly, if you ask them the right question, increasingly interested in seeing more proper regulation and governance in questions like this.

A poll we conducted in August of 2018 asked Americans whether—given the fact that Arms Export Control Act laws that govern foreign aid to countries with nuclear weapons programs that haven’t signed the NPT, and the fact that Israel has not signed the NPT—should those laws be enforced, 54.8 percent said yes. So this is material, raw material.

Someone just asked me before this, how do we contact these people? Well, that’s the work at hand, but raw material for building more representative rule of law governance in this country. People are clearly out there who are willing to and eager to see some of these things enforced.

So signs of hope are certainly that Americans are becoming better informed about some of the things the lobby has been doing. Hopefully, they can grasp, if they have the spectacles of supplant, silence, and exploit, they might be able to see something going on in their states or community. Courts are beginning to play a slightly more aggressive and productive role in allowing people to question these things using our legal system, and Martin McMahon and Saqib Ali will talk about that.

Some members of Congress are obviously demonstrating that they’d like to see more popular action. Most importantly, the institutionalization of groups who know something about what’s been going on and are willing to take some action is my biggest hope. My biggest hope is seeing some of the groups, particularly that come to this conference year after year, and hearing about their work attacking the silence, which is the weakest point of the cycle and the one that we have the best chance of prevailing against as organizations, activists, and people willing to take more of a leadership role in confronting these abuses. Thank you.

Questions & Answers

Dale Sprusansky: Thank you very much. We have a couple of minutes for questions here. So if you have any questions out there, please feel free to give them to someone collecting them so they can send them up to me. We have a couple of questions on the relationship between South Africa—apartheid South Africa—and Israel, and so the question is: What was the collaboration between Israel and apartheid South Africa to develop nuclear weapons?

Grant Smith: Right, so someone noticed I skipped a couple of slides in this presentation. What the 1974 CIA special report talking about Israel’s nuclear weapons most feared was collaboration with South Africa and Taiwan. The Israelis did in fact sign a contract with [South African Prime Minister] P.W. Botha to sell them nuclear-tipped missiles, Jericho missiles. Sasha Polakow-Suransky wrote an entire book about that after he obtained the documents from the post-apartheid government. Most people who are doing credible work on nuclear non-proliferation believe that the so-called Vela flash in the Indian Ocean in 1979 was an Israeli nuclear test with South Africa. So, yes, we can do an entire day-long conference, and I hope someday we can, about the Israeli nuclear weapons program and just how much information there is out there about it. But the U.S. ignores, it will not accept officially, that the Vela flash was an Israeli nuclear test. They don’t accept the authenticity of the South African government document release that there was an attempted sale of turnkey weapons systems to the apartheid regime. So just another example of your government at work under a supplanted policy of nuclear ambiguity.

Dale Sprusansky: Very good. Another question here: What can you say about President Carter’s divulgence of Israel’s nuclear weapons in 2008 and the aftermath?

Grant Smith: Yeah, I can say something about that. A judge won’t accept that. A judge will say, well, Carter wasn’t in office, so that’s not really an authoritative official statement. We’re sorry, IRmep, nice try, but we’re not going to release information based on the premise that it’s already official that presidents have acknowledged a nuclear weapons program.

Is Sam Husseini in the audience? Well, Sam Husseini is a reporter for the Institute for Public Accuracy who has done videos of major political figures in power—Condoleezza Rice, Dick Cheney—all running away from him and his camera crew when asked “Excuse me, sir, does Israel have nuclear weapons?” You would not believe the circumlocutions that you see these people go through when Sam Husseini traps them with his camera. So it doesn’t matter, unfortunately.

Dale Sprusansky: We have someone wondering what leverage does Israel use to compel U.S. presidents to sign the letters that you discussed?

Grant Smith: Right. According to the story, these nuclear ambiguity maintenance letters come at the worst possible moment. For President Trump, it was as he was facing the ouster of a general and dealing with all sorts of startup conflicts, and suddenly Dan Meridor of the [Israeli] Embassy shows up with a letter, saying, well, you have to sign this, Mr. President, because every other president three times before you signed them and you have to do it. You have to give us this guarantee that you will not be as spontaneous with us as you are in a lot of things. So he signed it. Apparently, they were angered by it within the administration. They felt undue pressure. They felt like this was out of line. But they signed it.

Dale Sprusansky: I think we have time for one more question here. Can you touch on Shimon Peres’ role in the nuclear armament of Israel and the Israeli-French relationship?

Grant Smith: Absolutely. Father of the Israeli nuclear program—and there’s going to be a lot more history written when sort of the full set of classified documents come out about his role in making that come about. But as you say, Dale, we’re moving to something far more important, which is going to be James North who’s going to be speaking about The New York Times. So I would like to say thank you very much, and don’t forget once again to get your extra beverage ticket at the front desk with a full Ideas Fair passport. Thank you.

Dale Sprusansky: Thank you, Grant. I think we can never devote enough time to your research. That’s why you should buy his books.