Israel’s Nuclear Triggers

[Ed Jewett]

Israel's Nuclear TriggersSecret files reveal brazen espionage and dangerous immunity

http://original.antiwar.com/smith-grant/...-triggers/

by Grant Smith, March 22, 2012
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FBI files detailing Israel's stealth acquisition of U.S. nuclear triggers were declassified and released on Dec. 28, 2011. The FBI's secret Portland and Los Angeles inter-office communications were originally scheduled for release in the year 2036. Their availability today reveals how Israel's elite spy networks acquire U.S. nuclear technologies while evading criminal and diplomatic consequences.A kryton is a gas-filled tube used as a high-speed switch. U.S. State Department munitions licenses are needed to export krytons because they can be used as triggers for nuclear weapons. California-based MILCO International Inc. shipped 15 orders totaling 800 krytons through an intermediary to the Israeli Ministry of Defense between 1979 and 1983. MILCO obtained the krytons from EG&G Inc. After the U.S. government rejected several requests for kryton export licenses to Israel, Arnon Milchan's Heli Trading Company brokered the transactions with MILCO. Milchan is an Israeli movie producer who became successful in Hollywood for such movies asBrazil, JFK, and Pretty Woman.The FBI file reveals that after the illicit kryton exports were discovered, a U.S. attorney tried to flip MILCO President Richard Kelly Smyth to implicate Milchan during intense plea bargaining. The gambit failed, and in May 1984 Smyth was indicted on 30 counts of smuggling and making false statements. Smyth and his wife promptly fled to Israel and remained at large until captured in Malaga, Spain, in July 2001 after Richard Smyth applied for Social Security benefits. INTERPOL arrested Smyth and extradited him to the United States, where he pleaded guilty to violating the U.S. Arms Export Control Act. In November 2001, Smyth was sentenced to 40 years in prison and fined $20,000, though he was freed within four years because of his advancing age.In 1985, a federal grand jury was convened in Los Angeles to investigate potentially related Atomic Energy Act and Arms Export Control Act violations, but no charges were ever filed against Milchan or those who secretly helped Smyth flee and who covered his living expenses abroad. A 2011 biography called Confidential: The Life of Secret Agent Turned Hollywood Tycoon Arnon Milchan claims that Milchan was recruited into Israel's LAKAM economic espionage unit in his 20s and became a key operative for Benjamin Blumberg (head of LAKAM) and Rafi Eitan (who ran Jonathan Pollard and infiltrated NUMEC). Milchan is also the close confidant of Shimon Peres and Benjamin Netanyahu. According to the book, Blumberg himself taught Milchan how to establish front companies and secret bank accounts to launder millions in commissions obtained during LAKAM and Mossad arms transactions. In turn, it was Milchan who encouraged Smyth in 1972 to incorporate MILCO and share profits on export sales to his Tel Avivbased Milchan Brothers company. Milchan Brothers received purchase orders from Blumberg and sent them on via secure telex to Smyth. MILCO did 80% of its business with Milchan, including shipments of other dual-use technologies useful to Israel's clandestine nuclear weapons program such as gyroscopes, neutron generators, high-speed oscilloscopes, and computerized flight control systems. According to the book, after Smyth was ordered to appear before a federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, LAKAM issued a burn notice. Milchan claimed, "I felt bad, but I was ordered to cut all contact with Smyth." Milchan still officially denies any involvement in MILCO/Heli's kryton smugglingThe FBI records reveal ongoing interest in Milchan into the mid-1990s. In 1992, a confidential informant relayed details of Milchan's ties to Smyth. The declassified but heavily redacted "secret" communications reveal the Bureau's fascination with Milchan, from his 1996 entry in Who's Who to A-list associates such as Robert De Niro and an unsavory Iran-Contra operative.Like the NUMEC case, the kryton caper benefited from flawed elite news coverage that today seems superficial if not suspicious. Among the final pages of the FBI's file is a clipping of Thomas Friedman's May 1985 New York Times interview with Milchan, who had suddenly decamped for Jerusalem after the Smyth indictments. Milchan said he had only recently learned "that a kryton was a small little gizmo which anyone can go buy freely in the United States. You can use them or all kinds of things, including, incidentally, making cholent." Friedman clarified for readers that "Cholent is a stew of beans, carrots, potatoes and beef that is a traditional Jewish dish prepared on Friday night for eating on the Sabbath. Mr. Milchan said that with a kryton timer a stove could be set to turn on automatically to heat up cholent on the Sabbath without anyone working to light the fire."The FBI's news clipping file contains far less credulous accounts of frantic State Department attempts to secure the return of the krytons or at least verify that they were not being deployed into Israel's secret nuclear arsenal. Unlike most U.S. government agencies, the FBI didn't muzzle itself under "strategic ambiguity" protocols but instead spoke candidly of Israel's nukes. "At the time of [Smyth's] disappearance, the U.S. did not have any reliable information that the Israelis were enriching uranium via uranium hexafluoride. That information did not surface for another year until an individual named [Mordecai Vanunu] detailed drawings and photographs of Dimona, Israel's nuclear research center, to the London Times."The declassified details of Smyth's and Milchan's flight, elite influence networks, and near complete lack of accountability over the kryton case fits neatly into a larger emerging set of attributes common to many major Israeli espionage efforts in the United States. As happened during NUMEC's diversion of weapons-grade nuclear material to Israel, apparently more time was spent exploring Milchan's elite connections than figuring out how to indict LAKAM's nuclear technology operative. As in the case of the Lawrence Franklin AIPAC espionage affair, the mysterious figures who offered to spirit the main operative out of the United States to overseas safe houses were never apprehended or even publicly identified.In America today, open financial support for Israel's clandestine nuclear program is becoming more brazen even as many of its supporters and lobbyists demand U.S. military attacks on Iran's nuclear program. The American Committee for the Weizmann Institute raises millions in tax-deductible funding for its Israeli parent organization, which was found in a 1987 Pentagon-sponsored study to have developed a cutting-edge high-energy physics and hydrodynamics program "needed for nuclear bomb design." The Weizmann Institute advanced methods for enriching uranium to weapons-grade through the use of lasers even as the United States worried that Weizmann's networked supercomputers were being used to reduce the size of warheads. Despite public calls for an IRS review of its tax-exempt status, the American Committee plows on announcing new corporate grants, ever confident that its elite overlapping board, which has included such luminaries as AIPAC/WINEP chairman emeritus Robert Asher, will back Weizmann, ensuring that nuclear funding continues to flow.Perhaps trying not to be outdone, President Barack Obama announced at AIPAC's Washington conference that he will soon take center stage in the Israeli nuclearThéâtre de l'Absurde. According to author Avner Cohen, Israeli President Shimon Peres was a key architect of Israel's nuclear weapons program from its very beginning. In 2010, scholar Sasha Polakow-Suransky released secret documents revealing how Peres even offered to sell nuclear-tipped Jericho missiles to the foundering apartheid regime in South Africa. That is why this summer, when Obama personally awards Peres a Presidential Medal of Freedom, he'll be conferring America's highest civilian award to the Middle East's most notorious nuclear proliferator.

Read more by Grant Smith

• The Mossad Has Long Given Marching Orders to AIPAC February 27th, 2012
  
• AIPAC Obtained Missile Secrets February 5th, 2012
  
• AIPAC Tries to Bamboozle DC Appeals Court January 10th, 2012
  
• AIPAC Economic Warfare Also Targets US December 9th, 2011
  
• Americans Pay Dearly to Maintain Israel's Nuclear Secrets October 19th, 2011
  

[Magda Hassan]

Netanyahu Worked Inside Nuclear Smuggling Ring
Counterespionage debriefing reveals how Israel targeted U.S.
by Grant Smith, July 04, 2012
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On June 27, 2012, the FBI partially declassified and released seven additional pages[.pdf] from a 19852002 investigation into how a network of front companies connected to the Israeli Ministry of Defense illegally smuggled nuclear triggers out of the U.S.* The newly released FBI files detail how Richard Kelly Smyth who was convicted of running a U.S. front company met with Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel during the smuggling operation. At that time, Netanyahu worked at the Israeli node of the smuggling network, Heli Trading Company. Netanyahu, who currently serves as Israel's prime minister, recently issued a gag order that the smuggling network's unindicted ringleader refrain from discussing "Project Pinto."
As revealed in previously released FBI files and the tell-all book Confidential: The Life of Secret Agent Turned Hollywood Tycoon Arnon Milchan, the Hollywood producer was recruited into Israel's economic espionage division (LAKAM) in his 20s and learned how to establish front companies and secret bank accounts for smuggling operations. Arnon Milchan encouraged Smyth, a California engineer, to incorporate MILCO in 1972 and serve as a front for the Israel-based Heli Trading's (also known as Milchan Limited) acquisitions of sensitive military technologies on behalf of the Ministry of Defense. Smyth fled the U.S. after being indicted for violating the Arms Export Control Act in the mid-1980s. In July 2001, Smyth was arrested in Spain by Interpol and returned to the U.S., and in November, he was convicted of exporting 800 nuclear triggers (called krytrons).
FBI agents interviewed Smyth on April 16-17, 2002, at the U.S. attorney's office in Los Angeles. The secret interview report details how during a trip to Israel Smyth was "spotted" by Milchan, who claimed he worked as an exclusive purchasing agent for the Ministry of Defense. Smyth was introduced around to high military officials including then-general Ariel Sharon. Smyth was also put in contact with Benjamin Netanyahu, who worked at Heli Trading Company. According to the FBI report, "Smyth and [Netanyahu] would meet in restaurants in Tel Aviv and in [Netanyahu's] home and/or business. It was not uncommon for [Netanyahu] to ask Smyth for unclassified material."
Milchan pulled Smyth into his glamorous, star-studded movie circuit. "While in the United States [Smyth] met with [Milchan] numerous times in Los Angeles. … Milchan and Smyth would have dinner frequently and would visit one another's house often … it was quite common for [Milchan] to invite [Smyth] to various Hollywood parties and introduce [Smyth] to celebrities."
During the 2002 Smyth counterintelligence debriefing, the FBI learned that the Ministry of Defense ordered and paid Heli Trading for krytrons. Heli in turn sourced them from MILCO in a clandestine operation codenamed Project Pinto. The report reveals how MILCO illegally shipped prohibited articles under general Commerce Department export licenses rather than smuggling them out via Israeli diplomatic pouches. The last time Smyth saw Milchan was in 1985. The Ministry of Defense issued a burn notice on Smyth after discussions with U.S. officials about the krytron smuggling. According to the FBI report, "Shortly thereafter, [Smyth] fled the United States."
A March 2012 statement by the co-authors of Confidential claims that "Hollywood mega-producer and former secret agent Arnon Milchan has been asked directly by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Shimon Peres to avoid any public discussion of the book Confidential, asserting that the matter is too sensitive at this time." Although the book's authors point to the escalating tensions over Iran's nuclear program, Netanyahu's own hands-on involvement in nuclear weaponsrelated covert action against America is presumably a far more compelling reason for the gag order.
* The FBI referred an additional 164 pages of the Mandatory Declassification Review to another government agency presumably the CIA for further review. The additional pages will likely never be released. The CIA has refused requests for similar documents in order to preserve intelligence sources and methods abroad.
http://original.antiwar.com/smith-grant/...ling-ring/

[Peter Lemkin]

Interesting, but NOT surprising they came from EG&G Inc., which is the primary 'private corporation' involved with both Area 51 and the Nuclear testing and development in the USA. Area 51, whatever else it is is 'handled' by: NSA, CIA, NRO DOD, Dept of Energy, all of the major spook-related war-manufacturing companies, and all of the other spy shops other than, perhaps FBI. EG&G is almost unknown publicly and not allowed to be mentioned by the Government nor controlled and embedded MSM, yet they are a BIG player in all things nuclear. To work at EG&G one needs Top Secret, Q-clearances just to clean the toilets. All of the other nuclear and military contractors other than EG&G are publicly known. EG&G is the most sensitive and secret of all.