How To Smuggle 200 Tons of Uranium
Yep, the kind used to make nuclear weapons.
The Dimona reactor in Israel, now known as the Shimon Peres Negev Nuclear Research Center, is a highly classified facility. Israel claims that the nuclear reactor and research facility are for general “research purposes into atomic science”. The reality is that it creates material for Israel’s nuclear weapons program. It is not a power plant and does not send electricity to the Israeli grid.
It is heavily guarded, to the point that they will shoot down their own aircraft. They’ve done it, in fact. In the 1967 Six-Day War, a damaged Israeli jet strayed into the restricted airspace over the facility and was shot down by anti-air defenses, killing the pilot.
France assisted in the construction of Dimona and provided uranium fuel, but this ended when Charles de Gaulle was elected. Israel had to turn to other sources, which became more and more restricted. There was a growing worldwide resistance to nuclear weapons proliferation and increasing control of fissionable materials imposed by such bodies as Euratom and IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency). Israel refused to allow inspection of Dimona and did not sign the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), even under intense pressure from the United States. But they still needed the material.
Enter the Mossad.
A front company called Biscayne Trader's Shipping Corporation was set up in Liberia. Many shipping companies use the country as a flag of convenience, since they have lower registration fees and tonnage taxes, and fewer labor and environmental regulations.
Now with a company, the next step was to purchase a freighter, the Scheersberg A, and “convince” an official at Union Minière, a German petrochemical company, to sell them the material. This amounted to 200 tons of yellowcake uranium, which is a powder containing 75 to 90% uranium. It is a step above uranium ore, but has to be processed further to turn it into either fuel or weapons material.
With the yellowcake marked as “plumbat”, a lead product then used in paint, the freighter was loaded and set sail. The crew was all either Mossad or recruited by them, all under forged passports. The destination was Italy, where a contract had been signed with a paint company to process the “plumbat”.
If you look at a map, however, they sailed a bit past Italy by seven or eight hundred miles, past Crete and into the Aegean Sea. At night, they rendezvoused with an Israeli freighter and transferred the cargo while a small flotilla of Israeli gunboats provided cover. The yellowcake was taken straight to Haifa while the Scheersberg A sailed on to Turkey. They did have the courtesy to contact the Italian paint company and cancel the contract.
Details of the story came out in 1973, when Mossad operatives were arrested in Norway following the assassination of a man thought to be a Palestinian terrorist (which I wrote about here: https://alhaganbooks.substack.com/p/operation-wrath-of-god ).
Dan Ert (AKA Dan Arbel) was one of the people arrested, and he confessed the story to the Norwegians. Reportedly, he was claustrophobic and was willing to tell them everything in return for not being confined in a small jail cell. And what he told them was true. A little research revealed that his name was listed as president of the Liberian company that bought the Scheersberg A.
Israel, of course, denied everything. And they have nuclear weapons. They deny that, too, of course, but keep it in the back of the minds of their enemies as much as possible. Estimates are that they have anywhere from 75 to 400 warheads.
At least two books have been published on this operation: The Plumbat Affair by Elaine Davenport, Paul Eddy, and Peter Gillman, and Operation Uranium Ship by Menachem Portugali, Dennis Eisenberg, and Eli Landau, both in 1978. In addition, Ken Follett wrote a fictional account of the operation in Triple in 1979.
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