Let me tell you something about the nature of pressure,
because pressure is really what this story is about. Not the kind that builds
inside a reactor—though that’s in here too—but the social kind. The
geopolitical kind. The kind that says: you, over there, open your doors,
while the guy doing the pointing keeps his own doors not just locked but
bricked over, plastered smooth, painted a friendly beige so you’d never even
know there were doors.
The United States and Israel have spent the better part of
four decades pressuring Iran over its alleged weapons of mass destruction.
Pressuring is maybe too gentle a word. Hectoring. Threatening. Sanctioning.
Building elaborate coalitions of disapproval that hum along like a machine,
like something with moving parts and lubrication schedules and quarterly
maintenance reviews. And here’s the thing that would be funny if it weren’t so
goddamn serious: their own intelligence reports—their own, the ones
their own people wrote, the ones sitting in manila folders in
climate-controlled rooms beneath Washington—have repeatedly, stubbornly, almost
embarrassingly failed to find definitive evidence of an active Iranian nuclear
bomb program.
Not for lack of looking, mind you. They looked plenty hard.
They still do.
Iran, for what it’s worth, signed the Nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty. Has it memorized, probably. Operates under strict
oversight from the International Atomic Energy Agency, which is the global
nuclear neighborhood watch, the people who show up with clipboards and Geiger
counters and humorless expressions. Iranian leaders have maintained,
consistently and with the kind of repetitive insistence that starts to sound
either like lying or like absolute truth depending on your priors, that their
nuclear program is strictly for civilian energy and research.
Israel, on the other hand—
Well. Israel never signed the NPT. Blocked international
inspections. Built what most intelligence analysts now believe—believe
being one of those great weasel words we use when we mean know but can’t
quite prove in court—is a mature nuclear arsenal. Hundreds of warheads, if
you trust the estimates. Jericho ballistic missiles. Nuclear-capable fighter
jets. Dolphin-class submarines sliding through dark water like steel cigars
packed with the end of the world.
Zero oversight.
You sit with that a minute.
---
Israel’s nuclear history is, as a subject, roughly as
popular in mainstream media circles as a skunk at a garden party. People know
it’s there. Nobody wants to be the one standing next to it when the guests
arrive. So it doesn’t get discussed much. It doesn’t get discussed the way a
story this large and this strange should get discussed, which is
probably a story in itself—about who owns the megaphone, and who taught them to
use it, and what they were told to say and not say into it.
But the history is there. Patient as geology. And it
involves—stay with me here, because it gets weird in the way that only true
things do—scientists, Hollywood producers, stolen electronics, a young diplomat
who would eventually become his country’s prime minister, and a smuggling
network that operated for four years in broad American daylight.
It involves, in short, the kind of story that if you put it
in a novel, your editor would send it back with a note saying too
convenient, too on-the-nose, scale it back.
---
Israel’s nuclear ambitions were forged, like most of the
country’s defining psychology, in the shadow of existential fear and the long,
scorched memory of the Holocaust. David Ben-Gurion—the first prime minister, a
small, white-haired man whose face looked like it had been carved from
something very hard and then left out in the weather—believed with the
certainty of a man who has witnessed atrocity that his people’s survival could
only be guaranteed through absolute military superiority. Not relative
superiority. Absolute. The kind that makes the other side decide the
calculation isn’t worth it.
For Ben-Gurion, advanced science and technology were the
ultimate guarantors. Geography had failed the Jewish people. Demographics had
failed them. Diplomacy had failed them in the most spectacular, industrialized,
bureaucratically efficient way imaginable. But physics—physics didn’t care
about any of that. Physics was the great equalizer. Physics, properly
harnessed, was the thing that let a small country surrounded by hostile
neighbors sleep at night.
That ambition materialized after the 1956 Suez Crisis—that
brief, humiliating adventure in which Britain and France demonstrated that
empire was over and America was now the adult in the room whether it wanted to
be or not. In the aftermath, through secret meetings in Sèvres—picture a French
country house, drawn curtains, men in good suits speaking carefully—Israel
convinced France to become its primary defense partner. France, tangled in the
Algerian War and watching Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s brand of Arab
nationalism spread like a grease fire, saw Israel as something useful: a sharp
instrument that could be held in reserve. The partnership birthed the
heavy-water reactor at Dimona, tucked into the Negev Desert like a secret
folded into a pocket. Underground plutonium processing facilities. And, by the
late 1950s, roughly 2,500 French technicians quietly deployed to the desert,
men with expertise and overtime pay and presumably very good reasons to keep
their mouths shut.
---
A small digression here, because it’s relevant: in 1955,
under the Atoms for Peace program—which had the sunny, civic-minded optimism of
something named by a public relations committee—the U.S. sold Israel a small
research reactor. The agreement came with a very clear prohibition: no
plutonium production. This was not, you understand, an ambiguous clause. It was
not legalese open to interpretation. It said: you may not do this specific
thing. Israel read this prohibition and, apparently, nodded politely and did
the thing anyway, diverting the reactor toward weapons research.
When American intelligence caught wind of the hidden Dimona
site in the early 1960s—because you can’t hide 2,500 French technicians
forever, not in a desert, not anywhere—Israel told them, with what must have
been an absolutely straight face, that the facility was dedicated to health,
science, and desert agriculture.
Desert agriculture.
In April 1963, President Kennedy sent what can only be
described as a very uncomfortable letter to Prime Minister Ben-Gurion and his
successor, Levi Eshkol. JFK wanted inspections. Regular ones. He wanted
transparency. He noted, with presidential understatement, that vital American
support could be jeopardized without it. Between 1961 and 1969, American
inspection teams visited Dimona eight times. Eight. And every single time, they
left having found nothing alarming, because Israel had built fake control rooms—fake
control rooms, the kind of detail that belongs in a thriller about
institutional deception, which is exactly what this is—and had completely
walled off the underground plutonium plant. Sealed it. Hidden it behind fresh
drywall and a helpful docent who pointed at benign equipment and answered
questions about civilian enrichment.
Kennedy kept pushing. He worked to strengthen the IAEA’s
regional non-proliferation role. He was, by all available evidence, genuinely
alarmed.
He was assassinated in November 1963.
Decades of conspiracy theories followed, some linking the
Mossad and the CIA to a cover-up designed to protect Israel’s nuclear program.
These theories still surface occasionally in American politics, like something
that was buried but keeps working its way back up through the soil. Most
serious historians treat them skeptically. What they don’t dispute is the
timeline: Kennedy pressing hard on nuclear transparency, Kennedy dead, the
pressing stops. Make of that what you will. People always do.
---
Now. Here’s where the story gets genuinely technical, and
the technical part is important, because it explains what came next.
To build an operational nuclear weapon—not a dirty bomb, not
a device that spreads radioactive material around like a catastrophic spill,
but an actual bomb that achieves the critical chain reaction—you need what’s
called an implosion design. You need conventional explosives positioned around
a plutonium core that detonate within microseconds of each other,
compressing that core so perfectly, so symmetrically, that the fission event
occurs at precisely the right moment and with precisely the right geometry. The
Fat Man bomb that ended Nagasaki used this design. Miss the synchronization by
even a fraction, and what you have is an expensive mess, not a weapon.
Israel had first-generation warheads. What it needed next,
to miniaturize them for ballistic missiles—to make them small enough to sit
atop a Jericho and be pointed at something a thousand kilometers away—was
American electronics. Specifically, the krytron.
The krytron. Roll that word around for a moment. It sounds
like something from a science fiction novel, which maybe explains why it didn’t
get more press coverage. A krytron is a high-speed electronic switch capable of
releasing massive bursts of current with the kind of timing precision that
makes nuclear detonation possible. EG&G, a U.S. defense contractor, had a
monopoly on them. The State Department controlled exports. There was,
emphatically, no legal way for Israel to purchase krytrons.
Shimon Peres—defense official, future prime minister, Nobel
Peace Prize laureate, a man whose late-life reputation as a statesman of great
wisdom and restraint was built partly on a foundation of very creative
problem-solving—established LAKAM. A specialized intelligence bureau dedicated
entirely to scientific espionage and smuggling. Because when you can’t buy what
you need, you find other ways. This is the logic of desperation, or of
ideology, or of both at once. Peres had seen what ideological commitment to
survival could accomplish. He was not squeamish about methods.
---
What LAKAM launched next was Project Pinto.
Operating between 1979 and 1983—while American law
enforcement watched other horizons, chased other problems, turned its
institutional attention to other priorities—the network was built around two
men. Richard Kelly Smyth, an American aerospace engineer and NATO consultant.
And Arnon Milchan.
Milchan. Now there’s a name. He would eventually become one
of Hollywood’s most powerful producers—Pretty Woman, L.A. Confidential, Fight
Club, dozens more. But in the late 1970s he was an Israeli businessman with
impeccable connections and a family chemical company that, like many family
chemical companies, turned out to be a useful front for clandestine
international logistics. He had been recruited into LAKAM as a young man, by
Peres himself. Something about that recruitment—the way Peres apparently
recognized in the young Milchan a combination of charisma, flexibility, and
patriotism that made him ideal for work that didn’t appear in any official
roster—is almost novelistic in itself.
Milchan established a web of shell companies. He siphoned
sensitive technology. His later success in Hollywood gave him something
invaluable: cover so thick it was almost impenetrable. A man who produces
blockbuster films travels constantly. Makes enormous deals. Cultivates
relationships with powerful people across multiple industries and multiple
countries. Nobody looks twice at the logistics, because the logistics of making
movies are genuinely that complicated. One of his companies, Heli Trading, became
the central hub for Israel’s smuggling supply chain.
Milchan brought Smyth into it. Smyth’s company, MILCO
International, bought krytrons from EG&G under the pretense of domestic
American use—false documentation, routine paperwork, the kind of bureaucratic
camouflage that functions because people mostly expect the documents in front
of them to say true things. Then the shipments went to Heli Trading. Eight
hundred krytrons, ordered and falsified and labeled as ordinary radio tubes.
Fifteen batches. Gyroscopes. Neutron generators. Flight-control systems. All of
it flowing in one direction, toward the Israeli military, while American export
regulators inspected the paperwork and found ordinary radio tubes.
At the time, a young man named Benjamin Netanyahu was
working as an executive at Heli Trading.
Declassified FBI documents confirmed his involvement. Smyth
testified that he met regularly with Netanyahu in Tel Aviv to coordinate the
smuggling logistics. This is not speculation. This is not conspiracy theory.
This is the documented, evidentiary record, and it sits in a peculiar kind of
silence for a fact of its scale—the kind of silence that is itself a statement
about who shapes narratives and whose past is subject to the kind of scrutiny
that would end a political career and whose past is, somehow, not.
Netanyahu has spent over thirty years as perhaps the world’s
most insistent and operatic voice warning about Iran’s nuclear ambitions. He
has brought props to the United Nations—literally, visual aids, cartoon-style
illustrations of bombs with fuses—to make his case. The context of Project
Pinto doesn’t definitively explain this campaign. But it does give it a
different texture. It does make you wonder what it looks like, from the inside,
to have stolen nuclear components from your closest ally and watched your
accomplices face justice while you rose to political prominence, and to spend
the next three decades as the loudest voice in the room about the dangers of
nuclear proliferation.
---
The cover blew in the mid-1980s, around the same time a U.S.
Navy analyst named Jonathan Pollard was arrested for selling secrets to LAKAM.
Funny how threads pull, in retrospect. In May 1984, a federal grand jury
indicted Smyth on 30 counts. Facing more than a century in prison, he and his
wife fled California. Israeli operatives helped them go. Smyth lived under
false identities across Europe for sixteen years—sixteen—until his
arrest in Malaga in July 2001. He was extradited, pled guilty, and received a
40-month sentence. Lenient, the court noted, because of his advanced age. Four
decades of nuclear secrets, 40 months. Do the math on what that says about how
seriously certain crimes are taken when the political entanglements get
complicated enough.
Israel went into damage control immediately after the 1985
exposure. Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin called it an administrative error. An
American exporter got confused, essentially. The krytrons, Israel helpfully
noted, had been for medical research. They offered to return them. A fraction
of the 800 came back. Washington accepted this, more or less, because the
alternative was a confrontation with an ally that served strategic interests
too important to jeopardize over eight hundred high-speed electronic switches.
The nuclear program continued uninterrupted.
In 1985, a former Israeli nuclear technician named Mordechai
Vanunu went to the London Sunday Times. He told them—with photographs, with
technical details, with the kind of specificity that comes from someone who was
actually inside the thing—that Israel possessed 100 to 200 nuclear weapons,
held thermonuclear capabilities, and had collaborated with apartheid South
Africa on nuclear development. For doing this, for telling the truth about what
he knew to be true, Vanunu was lured to Italy by a Mossad honey trap,
kidnapped, transported back to Israel, tried, and sentenced to eighteen years
in prison. He served all eighteen. He was released in 2004 and spent years
afterward under travel restrictions and surveillance.
The man who told the truth got eighteen years. The men who
stole the components the program ran on got nothing.
---
Milchan admitted his espionage past publicly in 2012. The
U.S. suspended his visa. Then Netanyahu—prime minister by then, and apparently
not without some personal stake in the matter—personally lobbied Secretary of
State John Kerry to have it restored. The lobbying worked. Milchan was welcomed
back.
Today there are ongoing corruption cases in Israel involving
Netanyahu that include, among other allegations, his facilitation of benefits
for Milchan in exchange for gifts and favorable media coverage. The nuclear
smuggling chapter is a prologue to a longer story about a certain way of
operating in the world: the idea that rules are for the people who can be made
to follow them, and that the people who can’t—or won’t—get to write the press
releases about everyone else’s compliance.
---
The core of Middle Eastern nuclear tensions cannot be fully
understood, not honestly, not accurately, without tracing the paper trail of
Project Pinto. That’s not a comfortable thing to say. It’s not something that
gets said often or loudly in the places where geopolitical narratives get
manufactured and distributed. But the documents exist. The indictments exist.
The testimony exists. The FBI files exist.
The story is there.
It’s just waiting, patient as geology, for the kind of
attention that powerful people have worked very hard to make sure it never
gets.
In the end—and this is the thing that stays with you, that
follows you out of the story like something on your heel—the most dangerous
nuclear program in the Middle East wasn’t the one that got inspected. It was
the one that made sure it never had to be.
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