The Samson Option: How Israel, Not Iran, Poses The Real Nuclear Threat.

Iran does not have nuclear weapons, but Israel does and is willing to use them if they believe they are about to lose.

Recently, the genocidal IDF tweeted out a propaganda video showcasing the effect of a Nuclear launch.

“The world is facing one of its biggest nuclear threats in decades,” the announcer of the video said.

The video ends by claiming that “the biggest terrorist army in the world was about to have (a nuclear weapon) in their hands,” referring to Iran.

But Israel's claim - that Iran was about to obtain a Nuclear weapon- was completely fabricated.

Former CIA head William Burns, current DNI head Tulsi Gabbard, and even the U.S. intelligence community’s annual threat assessment report, put out in March, all acknowledge that there was no intention on the part of Iran to build a nuclear bomb.

This propaganda video was not intended to scare people about the non-existent Iranian nuclear threat, but was put out as a veiled threat of what Israel may do if it feels they are losing the war with Iran.

Israel, unlike Iran, does have a massive Nuclear arsenal, and a doctrine -dubbed the Samson Option- where they call to use it if they feel they will lose a war.

After a long investigation, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh revealed all of this in his 1991 book, “The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy”.

In this article, I will review the history of Israel obtaining the bomb and its continued threat to use it, including as a threat of blackmail to influence U.S. foreign policy.

The First Stages.

“The scientific father of the Israeli bomb,” Hersh reported, was “a slight, pale, chain-smoking scientist named Ernst David Bergmann”.

Hersh noted:

In November 1954, Bergmann introduced himself to the Israeli citizenry in a radio address and reported on Israel's progress in peaceful nuclear research. He announced — two years after the fact — that an Israeli Atomic Energy Commission had been established. The next year Israel signed an agreement with the United States, under the Eisenhower administration's Atoms for Peace program, for cooperation in the civilian uses of atomic energy. Washington helped finance and fuel a small nuclear reactor for research, located at Nahal Soreq, south of Tel Aviv. The agreement called for the United States to have inspection rights to the small reactor under the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, which provided for an Israeli guarantee, to be verified by inspections, that the nuclear materials would not be diverted to weapons research.

As Hersh noted, “Bergmann's dream of nuclear power plants was sincere,” but “it also amounted to a totally effective cover for his drive to develop the bomb”.

As Hersh noted, then Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion, “was the man in charge of all of this, with the aid of his brilliant young protege Shimon Peres, who was thirty years old when Ben-Gurion appointed him director general of the ministry of defense in late 1953. Bergmann's Israeli Atomic Energy Commission, as the public was not told in the radio address, was under the direct jurisdiction of Peres and the Defense Ministry. Nuclear power was not Ben-Gurion's first priority; the desert would glow before it bloomed.”

As Hersh wrote, “these three men would find an international ally to help create the bomb” in France.

Shimon Peres convinced David Ben-Gurion to locate the Nuclear facility “at Dimona, near the ancient city of Beersheba in his beloved Negev”.

Israel began building its Nuclear facility underground in Dimona with money and supplies from France. As Hersh wrote

Money was transferred directly to Paris from the prime minister's account and Saint-Gobain, the French chemical firm, then two years away from completing the reprocessing plant at Marcoule, was selected to build the Israeli reprocessing facility — underground. As they began work, Saint-Gobain's engineers were given access to the initial construction plans for the reactor, and were stunned by what they learned. The French-Israeli agreement called for the plant to be capable at its peak of producing 24 million watts (twenty-four megawatts) of thermal power, but its cooling ducts, waste facilities, and other specifications suggested that the plant would operate at two to three times that capacity

In 1958, the CIA analyst Dino Brugioni learned about Israel’s Nuclear facility and attempted to alert the Dwight Eisenhower White House about it, which seemed to tacitly approve of Israel’s Nuclear ambitions.

As Hersh wrote, “Brugioni remained fascinated by the Israeli construction at Dimona: ‘We kept on watching it. We saw it going up. The White House,’ he confirmed, also mystified, ‘never encouraged us to do further briefings. It was always 'Thank you,' and 'This isn't going to be disseminated, is it?' It was that attitude."

Hersh went on to write, “Brugioni prepared the presidential briefing materials for (intel agent Arthur C. ) Lundahl and knew that the intelligence on Israel was getting to the top. ‘The thing is,’ Brugioni said, ‘I never did figure out whether the White House wanted Israel to have the bomb or not.’”

Israel, in response, attempted to hide their nuclear facility from the United States, as Hersh writes, “The Israelis responded by planting large trees to block the line of vision of any would-be candid photographers”.

Hersh went on to note, “The cat-and-mouse game would continue for the next ten years, with the Israelis shielding the expanding construction at Dimona while the United States remained unable to learn categorically whether the Israelis were operating a chemical reprocessing plant. ‘We knew they were trying to fool us,’ said Brugioni, ‘and they knew it. The Israelis understood [aerial] reconnaissance. Hell, most of them were trained by the U.S. Air Force. It was an Alphonse and Gaston act.’”

Hersh also noted that the Eisenhower administration seemed to approve of Israel obtaining the bomb, writing, “By the end of 1959, Lundahl and Brugioni had no doubt that Israel was going for the bomb. There also was no doubt that President Eisenhower and his advisers were determined to look the other way.”

As Hersh noted, France continued to aid Israel’s nuclear ambition, including by illegally transporting heavy water to Israel. As Hersh wrote, “Norway remained among the international leaders in the export of heavy water in the 1950s, and its sales to the French Atomic Energy Commission had only one condition — that the heavy water not be transferred to a third country. That stipulation was ignored as the French Air Force secretly flew as much as four tons of the water — stored in oversized barrels — to Israel sometime in 1960”.

“Israel's strategic goal” Hersh noted, “was to achieve nothing less than a secure strike capacity, with thermonuclear weapons and missile and aircraft delivery systems capable of reaching targets in the Soviet Union”.

At the end of Eisenhower’s presidential term in 1960, the head of the Atomic Energy Commission, John A. McCone, leaked Israel's Nuclear ambitions to the press, planting a story about it in the New York Times and talking about it publicly on Meet the Press.

David Ben-Gurion and Eisenhower, however, worked together to cover up Israel’s building of nuclear weapons.

As Hersh wrote

The next day, Ben-Gurion publicly described to the full membership of the Knesset what was being built, in the name of Israel, in the Negev: a twenty-four-megawatt reactor "dedicated entirely to peaceful purposes." There was another facility on the grounds of Dimona, the prime minister added: "a scientific institute for arid zone research." When completed, BenGurion said, the entire facility "will be open to students from other countries." It was the first time members of Israel's parliament had been officially told about the reactor construction. Asked specifically about the published reports in Europe and the United States, Ben-Gurion casually denied them as "either a deliberate or unconscious untruth.

Eisenhower joined Ben-Gurion in this cover-up, with Hersh writing :

The Israeli statements were not challenged in subsequent days and weeks by the Eisenhower administration, which, having triggered the first public discussion of the Israeli bomb, immediately retreated in the face of Israeli's shameless denials. In a statement released to the press on the day after Ben-Gurion's speech, the White House joined with the Knesset in accepting the Israeli cover story for Dimona at face value: ‘The government of Israel has given assurances that its new reactor is dedicated solely for research purposes to develop scientific knowledge and thus to serve the needs of industry, agriculture, health and science. . . . Israel states it will welcome visits by students and scientists of friendly countries to the reactor upon its completion.’ The statement, personally approved by the President, added, ‘It is gratifying to note that as made public the Israel atomic energy program does not represent cause for special concern.’

As Hersh went on to write, “The administration's retreat continued on the next day: it was now concerned with limiting the worldwide criticism directed at Israel. A private State Department circular sent on December 22 to American embassies around the world, written in cablese, noted that the government ‘believes Israel atomic energy program as made public does not represent cause for special concern.’”

Enter JFK

John F. Kennedy did not hold Eisenhower’s ambivalence and even tacit support for Israel’s Nuclear weapons, and actively wanted American inspections at the Dimona Nuclear facilities.

The Israel lobby - at the time led by Abraham Feinberg- who Hersh noted “shared the early dreams of his good friend Ernst David Bergmann of a nuclear-armed Israel” and “served publicly as president of the Israel Bond Organization, while privately helping to raise some of the many millions of dollars needed to build the controversial reactor and reprocessing plant at Dimona” attempted to force Kennedy not to approve inspections of the Dimona facility.

As Hersh wrote:

His most pitched battle on behalf of Israel came in the early days of the Kennedy administration when he successfully helped fight off the initial Kennedy insistence that an American inspection team be permitted full and unfettered access to Dimona. Feinberg's success was rooted in the American political process. ‘My path to power,’ he explains, ‘was cooperation in terms of what they needed — campaign money.’

Feinberg apparently “agreed on an initial contribution of $500,000 to the presidential campaign” in exchange for JFK laying off inspections at the Dimona facility.

Shortly after, Hersh reported, Kennedy spoke to New York Times columnist Charles L. Bartlett and noted that “‘As an American citizen, he was outraged,’ Bartlett recalled, to have a Zionist group come to him and say: 'We know your campaign is in trouble. We're willing to pay your bills if you'll let us have control of your Middle East policy.' Kennedy, as a presidential candidate, also resented the crudity with which he'd been approached. ‘They wanted control,’ he angrily told Bartlett.”

As Hersh noted, though, “the fact remains that despite Kennedy's tough words to Bartlett, Abe Feinberg's influence inside the White House was established by the end of Kennedy's first year in office, and the young President did little to diminish it over the next two years.”

Hersh went on to note, “The political expediencies that forced him to be ambivalent about Dimona had to be frustrating. Kennedy eventually agreed to a series of face-saving American inspections of the Israeli nuclear facilities, although the label ‘inspection’ hardly does justice to what the Israelis would permit.”

Despite the limitation, Kennedy did continue to want an actual inspection at the Dimona facility, even appointing John McCone (who revealed Israel’s Nuclear program) as head of the CIA.

David Ben-Gurion continued to use his agents of influence in the Israel lobby-namely Abraham Feinberg- in an attempt to stop the inspection. As Hersh wrote:

securing inspection rights remained impossible. Ben-Gurion had no intention of permitting a legitimate inspection — for obvious reasons. His first line of defense was straightforward: political pressure, in the person of Abe Feinberg. ‘I fought the strongest battle of my career to keep them from a full inspection,’ Feinberg recalled. ‘I violently intervened not once but half a dozen times.’ He had been tipped off about the inspection demands by Myer Feldman and relayed his political complaints through him; he said he never discussed the matter directly with the President. The message was anything but subtle: insisting on an inspection of Dimona would result in less support in the 1964 presidential campaign. This message, Feinberg said, was given directly to Robert S. McNamara, the secretary of state, and Paul H. Nitze, then a senior defense aide: "I met with them together and said, 'You've got to keep your nose out of it.'

Hersh gave an example of a story he got from Paul H. Nitze, then senior defense aide,who recalled Feinberg intervening to prevent Kennedy’s proposal to halt the sale of advanced U.S. fighter aircraft to Israel unless they allowed an inspection. As Hersh wrote:

Nitze, in a subsequent interview, did not recall that meeting, but he did remember a later one-on-one confrontation with Feinberg over Dimona. The Israelis wanted to purchase advanced U.S. fighter aircraft: ‘I said no, unless they come clean about Dimona. Then suddenly this fellow Feinberg comes into my office and says right out, 'You can't do that to us.'

I said, 'I've already done it.' Feinberg said, ‘see to it that you get overruled.' I remember throwing him out of the office.

Three days later, Nitze added, ‘I got a call from McNamara. He said he'd been instructed to tell me to change my mind and release the planes. And I did.’ Nitze hesitated a moment and added: ‘Feinberg had the power and brought it to bear. I was surprised McNamara did this.’

Eventually, due to Kennedy selling offensive weapons to Israel, Ben-Gurion supported an American inspection at Dimona (only if they announced the inspections in advance) but refused to allow IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) inspections. As Hersh wrote:

The most important factor, clearly, in Ben-Gurion's decision to permit the inspections was the Kennedy administration's decision in mid-1962 to authorize the sale of Hawk surface-to-air missiles to Israel. The United States had provided Israel with specialized military training and sensitive electronic gear in the past, but sale of the Hawk — considered an advanced defensive weapon — was a major departure from past policy of selling no weaponry to Israel, and, as Israel had to hope, could lead to future sales of offensive American arms

There was one major concession by Washington. Dimona did not have to be inspected by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Ben-Gurion had insisted in his private exchanges with Kennedy that such inspections would violate Israel's sovereignty. The White House eventually agreed to send a specially assembled American inspection team into Dimona. That agreement was further softened by a second concession that, in essence, guaranteed that the whole procedure would be little more than a whitewash, as the President and his senior advisers had to understand: the American inspection team would have to schedule its visits well in advance, and with the full acquiescence of Israel. There would be no spot checks permitted.

In order to cover up the real Nuclear facility, Israel constructed a fake control room at Dimona, in coordination with France, in order to hide the real Nuclear reaction from the American inspectors. As Hersh wrote:

The Israeli scheme, based on plans supplied by the French, was simple: a false control room was constructed at Dimona, complete with false control panels and computer-driven measuring devices that seemed to be gauging the thermal output of a twenty-four-megawatt reactor (as Israel claimed Dimona to be) in full operation. There were extensive practice sessions in the fake control room, as Israeli technicians sought to avoid any slips when the Americans arrived. The goal was to convince the inspectors that no chemical reprocessing plant existed or was possible. One big fear was that the Americans would seek to inspect the reactor core physically, and presumably discover that Dimona was utilizing large amounts of heavy water — much of it illicitly obtained from France and Norway — and obviously operating the reactor at far greater output than the acknowledged twenty-four megawatts. It was agreed that the inspection team would not be permitted to enter the core "for safety reasons." In Abe Feinberg's view, Kennedy's unyielding demand for an inspection had left Israel with no option: "It was part of my job to tip them off that Kennedy was insisting on this. So they gave him a scam job."

Hersh noted that American inspections took place at this fake control room until 1969, writing:

The American team, following a pattern that would be repeated until the inspections came to an end in 1969, spent days at Dimona, climbing through the various excavations — many facilities had yet to be constructed — but finding nothing. They did not question the fact that the reactor core was off-limits and gave no sign that they were in any way suspicious of the control room. The Israelis even stationed a few engineers in a concealed area in the control room to monitor the machinery and make sure that nothing untoward took place.

Another aspect of the cover-up was made much easier by the fact that none of the Americans spoke or understood Hebrew.

One former Israeli official recalled that his job was to interpret for the American team. "I was part of the cover-up team. One of the engineers would start talking too much" in front of the Americans, the official said, and he would tell him, in seemingly conversational Hebrew, " 'Listen, you mother-fucker, don't answer that question.' The Americans would think I was translating.

Kennedy until his death, as Hersh noted, “profoundly committed to the principle of nonproliferation, continued throughout 1962 to pressure Ben-Gurion about international inspection and continued to receive the prime minister's bland and irritating assurances that Israel had no intention of becoming an atomic power. The President was far too politically astute not to understand, as he angrily told his friend Charles Bartlett, that the Israeli ‘sons of bitches lie to me constantly about their nuclear capability.’”

“By spring of 1963”, Hersh noted, “Kennedy's relationship with Ben-Gurion remained at an impasse over Dimona, and the correspondence between the two became increasingly sour”.

The Samson Option and Nuclear Blackmail

As Hersh writes, “Sometime early in 1968, Dimona finally was ordered into full-scale production and began turning out four or five warheads a year — there were more than twenty-five bombs in the arsenal by the Yom Kippur War in September 1973”.

At the same time, Israel came up with the doctrine of the “Samson Option”, the view that if Israel even felt its existence would be threatened, it would take the world out with it through Nuclear attacks.

As Hersh writes, “Many senior nonproliferation officials in the American government were convinced by the early 1990s that the Middle East remained the one place where nuclear weapons might be used. ‘Israel has a well-thought-out nuclear strategy and, if sufficiently threatened, they will use it,’ said one expert who has been involved in government studies on the nuclear issue in the Middle East for two decades.”

This doctrine is still in place today, as journalist Kit Klarenberg noted, “Dutch-born Israeli military theorist Martin van Creveld boasted in September 2003” that “We possess several hundred atomic warheads and rockets and can launch them at targets in all directions, perhaps even at Rome. Most European capitals are targets…We have the capability to take the world down with us. And I can assure you that that will happen before Israel goes under”.

By the time Richard Nixon and his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, came to power, Israel had full backing from the United States to become a nuclear power.

As Hersh noted :

Israel's development as a full-blown nuclear power by 1969 could not have come at a more fortuitous time, in terms of the American presidency. Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger approached inauguration day on January 20, 1969, convinced that Israel's nuclear ambitions were justified and understandable. Once in office, they went a step further: they endorsed Israel's nuclear ambitions.

The two American leaders also shared a contempt for the 1968 Nonproliferation Treaty, which had been so ardently endorsed in public by Lyndon Johnson.

The easing of the pressure from Washington removed any constraints on Dimona and the Israeli leadership, which correctly interpreted the end of the Culler inspections as an American carte blanche. The technicians and scientists at Dimona began operating in the early 1970s exactly as their American and Soviet counterparts had done in the first days of the Cold War — the Israelis made as many bombs as possible.*

By 1973, according to former Israeli government officials, the Israeli nuclear arsenal totaled at least twenty warheads, with three or more missile launchers in place.

Hersh also noted that “Israel also had an unknown number of mobile Jericho I missile launchers that had been manufactured as part of Project 700. The missiles had been capable since 1971 of hitting targets in southern Russia, including Tbilisi, near the Soviet oil fields, and Baku, off the coast of the Caspian Sea, as well as Arab capitals.”

Nixon and Kissinger, however, surely lived to regret this decision as Israel soon after used the Samson Option to blackmail them into supporting them militarily.

When believing they may lose the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Israel deployed the Samson option and blackmailed the United States into bailing them out.

As Hersh noted:

Over the next hours, the Israeli leadership — faced with its greatest crisis — resolved to implement three critical decisions: it would rally its collapsing forces for a major counterattack; it would arm and target its nuclear arsenal in the event of total collapse and subsequent need for the Samson Option; and, finally, it would inform Washington of its unprecedented nuclear action — and unprecedented peril — and demand that the United States begin an emergency airlift of replacement arms and ammunition needed to sustain an extended all-out war effort.

Hersh went on to write:

The kitchen cabinet agreed that the nuclear missile launchers at Hirbat Zachariah, as many as were ready, would be made operational, along with eight specially marked F-4S that were on twenty-four-hour alert at Tel Nof, the air force base near Rehovot. The initial target list included the Egyptian and Syrian military headquarters near Cairo and Damascus.

As Hersh went on to write:

There was an equally important second purpose for the arming of nuclear weapons, according to former Israeli government officials: such a drastic step would force the United States to begin an immediate and massive resupply of the Israeli military. There was widespread rage inside the Israeli cabinet at the Nixon White House — aimed especially at Henry Kissinger — over what was correctly perceived in Israel as an American strategy of delaying the resupply in an attempt to let the Arabs win some territory, and some self-respect, and thus set up the possibility of serious land-for-peace bargaining. Kissinger, just sworn in as secretary of state, would direct the negotiations.

As Hesh wrote, Israel effectively blackmailed Henry Kissinger into supplying the country with weapons under the threat of Nuclear armageddon.

As Hersh wrote:

In the second volume of his memoirs, Years of Upheaval, Kissinger made no mention of a nuclear threat, but he did describe a series of urgent telephone calls from Simcha Dinitz, the Israeli ambassador to Washington, that began at 1:45 a.m. on Tuesday, October 9 — just as the all-night meeting in Golda Meir's office was breaking up (it was 8:45 a.m. in Israel). Dinitz focused on one question, wrote Kissinger: "What could we do about resupply?" The same question was asked again, in a second telephone call, at 3:00 a.m. "Unless he wanted to prove to the [Israeli] cabinet that he could get me out of bed at will," wrote Kissinger, "something was wrong." Kissinger, accompanied by Peter W. Rodman, his longtime assistant, and Dinitz, accompanied by General Mordecai Gur, the Israeli military attache, met at 8:20 a.m. in the Map Room of the White House, where Kissinger was told of the desperate situation of the Israeli military and the need for more tanks and aircraft. "Israel stood on the threshold of a bitter war of attrition that it could not possibly win given the disparity of manpower," Kissinger said. "It had to do something decisive." At one point during the Map Room meeting, Kissinger wrote, Dinitz insisted that he and Kissinger needed to be alone. Rodman and Gur, who both could be trusted with the most sensitive information, were dismissed. Once they were alone, Dinitz's message, according to Kissinger, was merely that Golda Meir "was prepared to come to the United States personally for an hour to plead with President Nixon for urgent arms aid. . . ." It was a request that Kissinger could, and did, as he wrote, reject "out of hand and without checking with Nixon. Such a proposal could reflect only either hysteria or blackmail."

A more complete account of the Dinitz message would undoubtedly show that it was closer to blackmail, as Kissinger knew, and it worked. "By the evening of October 9," Kissinger said in his memoir, "Israel had been assured that its war losses would be made up. Relying on this assurance, it stepped up its consumption of war materiel, as we had intended."

How was Israel's warning of a potential Armageddon delivered to the United States? Neither Kissinger nor Dinitz could be reached to discuss the subject, although Dinitz's insistence on the one-on-one meeting with Kissinger — as well as Kissinger's description of the Dinitz message as "blackmail" — seems obviously linked to the nuclear issue.

As Hersh went on to write:

Kissinger has never talked publicly about the Israeli nuclear arming, and his closest advisers at the time, including Rodman and William G. Hyland, then handling Soviet affairs for the National Security Council, said they knew of no such information. The best source for what happened, nonetheless, is Kissinger himself, who privately acknowledged that there had been an Israeli nuclear threat both to Anwar Sadat and to Hermann F. Eilts, the American ambassador to Egypt who worked closely with Kissinger during the intense Middle East shuttle diplomacy of the mid-1970s.

Eilts had been handpicked in October 1973 by Kissinger for the assignment to Cairo, and he arrived there at the end of the Yom Kippur War. His first detailed conversation with Kissinger about his new assignment couldn't have been more dramatic. It took place, at Kissinger's request, at a hastily arranged breakfast in early November in Islamabad, Pakistan, where Kissinger had stopped overnight en route to a much delayed visit to China. "Henry spoke a lot about how on the fourth day of the war [October 9] the Israelis panicked," Eilts recalled, "and that's when the judgment was made to assist them. At that point" — and in similar discussions with Kissinger over the next three years — "there was never a word about nuclear arming." There was a final meeting in late 1976,at the end of the Ford administration — and the end of Kissinger's tenure as secretary of state — and Kissinger brought up the 1973 war again. "And then, in a sort of casual reference," Eilts said, "Henry threw in that there was concern that the Israelis might go nuclear. There had been intimations that if they didn't get military equipment, and quickly, they might go nuclear." Eilts recalled his surprise that "none of this had come out earlier." He also was surprised at the casualness of Kissinger's attitude: "It was just sort of a passing comment."

Kissinger was far less casual at the time he learned of Israel's intention. He told none of his colleagues in the cabinet about the nuclear threat, of course, but changed his mind overnight about the need to get military arms — in huge quantities — to Israel.

(Emphasis: Mine)

The Full Extent Of Israel’s Nuclear Program And Persecution of The Whistleblower.

The full extent of Israel’s Nuclear arsenal was only seen in public due to a whistleblower who worked on their development named Mordechai Vanunu.

A Moroccan Israeli who worked as a technician on the Dimona facility for years, Vanunu “smuggled a camera into the reprocessing plant during an overnight shift and wandered around undetected for some forty minutes, taking fifty-seven color photographs”.

“A few weeks later,” Hersh reported, “he was fired after calling for the formation of a Palestinian state during an Arab rally.”

Hersh noted that “disenchantment with his life, distress at the treatment of Arabs in Israel, and what he had learned inside Dimona — drove him to exile in Australia and eventually to the London Sunday Times.”

After Vanunu’s photos and notes were published by the Sunday Times, an American intelligence official said, “The scope of this is much more extensive than we thought. This is an enormous operation”.

Hersh wrote that “Vanunu told the Sunday Times that he believed the Israeli nuclear stockpile totaled more than two hundred warheads, an astonishingly high number — the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency were estimating into the early 1980s that Israel had only between twenty-four and thirty warheads”.

Hersh noted that “If Vanunu's information about the rate of plutonium reprocessing is correct — a steady production rate of 1.2 kilograms weekly — the reactor would be producing enough enriched materials for four to a dozen or more bombs a year, depending on warhead design.”

Even at a more conservative estimate, Hersh noted, “some American experts believe that Vanunu's statistics, whose essential accuracy is not in dispute, may reflect peak output, and not what is known as the normal flow rate. If so, Dimona could be producing sixteen to twenty kilograms of weapons-grade plutonium per year, enough for four or five warheads.”

For leaking this story, Vanunu was entrapped by Israeli spies working in the British press.

As Hersh wrote, Vanunu’s agent, the Colombian journalist Oscar E. Guerrero, “approached the Sunday Mirror” about the story.

Hersh noted that “the editors at the Sunday Times did not know that as they worked, Mordecai Vanunu had been compromised to the Israelis by a Fleet Street colleague named Nicholas Davies, the foreign editor of the Daily Mirror, sister newspaper of the Sunday Mirror”.

Nicholas Davies, as Hersh uncovered, was actually a Mossad agent who worked with another Israeli Mossad agent named Ari Ben-Menashe at an “international arms sales firm initially known as Ora Limited, which had operated out of Davies's London home since 1983”, to Iran during the Iran/Iraq war.

As Hersh wrote, “Ora Limited, set up with the approval of the Israeli government, according to Ben-Menashe, was designed to get arms flowing into Iran — one of many such undercover operations around the world. ‘Davies was my main backup on all the Iran arms sales,’ Ben-Menashe said.”

Hersh wrote, “Soon after Guerrero approached the Sunday Mirror, BenMenashe said, Davies learned of it and immediately telephoned him in Israel to tip him off”.

Because of this, the Mossad found out about the leak.

As Hersh wrote, “Vanunu's photographs, which had been shipped by BenMenashe directly to Israel — he was under strict orders to stay away from the Israeli embassy — created havoc. Ben-Menashe was told the next morning, ‘They're real’”.

Hersh noted, “There was fear that Vanunu knew that Israel had deployed nuclear land mines along the Golan Heights — and that he would talk about it. The land mines had been put in place in the early 1980s, when Vanunu was still working at Dimona”.

Israel then deployed its asset, Robert Maxwell the “publisher of the Mirror Group newspapers, the largest group of popular tabloids in Great Britain, which included the Daily and Sunday Mirror” to “top every story to put out the word that it's bullshit”.

Hersh reported, “Davies set up a meeting for Ben-Menashe with Maxwell at his ninth-floor office. Maxwell made it clear at the brief session, Ben-Menashe recalled, that he understood what was to be done about the Vanunu story. ‘I know what has to happen,’ Maxwell told Ben-Menashe. ‘I have already spoken to your bosses.’”

Hersh also noted that “Rupert Murdoch's fellow press baron and major competitor was known for his closeness to Israel's top leadership.”

Hersh went on to report, “Peter J. Miller, the Sunday Mirror's senior news editor, who was fired by Maxwell in 1990, angrily complained that the newspaper's treatment of the Vanunu story had been turned around because of pressure from above. ‘The line we were instructed to take,’ Miller said, ‘cost the Sunday Mirror a world-beating exclusive.’

Hersh went on to note, “John Parker, who left the Mirror in 1988 to publish King of Fools, a best-selling biography of the Duke of Windsor, also expressed bitterness over the handling of the Vanunu story. ‘The Sunday Mirror had the biggest story in the world at that time, and it collapsed because of the line they took,’ he said. ‘It was a classic exercise by the Israelis in disinformation’”.

As Hersh noted in one of the Mossad/Maxwell-directed disinformation articles published:

Israeli officials were quoted as claiming that Vanunu had been fired from Dimona the year before "for attempting to copy documents." An Israeli press attache added: "There is not, and there never has been, a scientist by this name working in nuclear research in Israel. I can confirm that a Mordecai Vanunu worked as a junior technician in the [Israeli] Atomic Energy Commission." The Sunday Mirror had attacked the credibility of Vanunu's photographs, quoting an unidentified nuclear weapons expert as saying that they could have been taken in an "egg factory”. Vanunu's account was a hoax, or even something more sinister — a plot to discredit Israel."

Aside from this, the Mossad operation got Mordechai Vanunu entrapped back in Israel.

As Hersh wrote:

Handling Robert Maxwell's Sunday Mirror was one thing, but the Sunday Times was still known to be at work on the Vanunu story — and the Israeli intelligence community had no clout at the top at the Times. ‘Those guys were not us,’ BenMenashe said. ‘They wanted the real story.’ The next step was to find Vanunu, still hiding out in London, and somehow manage to get him out of England. ‘We didn't know what hotel he was staying at,’ Ben-Menashe added. ‘We asked Nick to ask around and find out where the fuck he was. Nick did it, and we spotted him.’ Within days, the lonely Vanunu, who did not know about the land mines, Ben-Menashe said, was entrapped by the Mossad's Cindy Hanin Bentov and en route to Rome.

Hersh went on to write :

No kidnapping could take place in England for diplomatic reasons. Instead, the lonely Vanunu was enticed by a Mossad agent named Cindy Hanin Bentov (a pseudonym) to leave for Rome a few days before publication of the story. Once in Rome, Vanunu has told family members, he was taken by taxi to an apartment, where he was drugged and returned to Israel by ship to stand trial. He was sentenced in March 1988 to eighteen years in a maximum-security prison.

Every Accusation Is A Confession

The saying never fails: every Israeli accusation is a confession. In this case, Israel fabricated a claim of an “Iranian nuclear threat” to justify a regime change war while being the only actual Nuclear threat in the region.

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