What’s common between Israel and Pakistan’s nuclear programmes?

Even as Israel launched military strikes at Iran on June 13 alleging that the latter was in the final stages of enriching uranium to a level that it could be used for a military offensive, what comes to the fore is the story of how the Jewish nation used the shadiest of tactics to become a nuclear power several decades ago.

Strikingly, though not as colourful and intriguing, Pakistan, too, can boast of a similar trajectory of misadventures and notoriety, having stolen secrets for enriching uranium from the same Jülich, Germany-based consortium named Urenco.

What this crucial gas centrifuge technology does is to separate the fissile isotope, U-235, from U-238 from natural uranium, which contains only a small percentage of the former. While uranium enriched to around 3-5% can be used in nuclear power plants, it needs to be enriched to 90% for making nuclear weapons.

Now, Israel had a team in place, named Lekem (officially known as Science Liaison Bureau, which ran its operations from 1957 to 1986 and pronounced as Lakam), to secure by whatever means possible, through bribing and cheating through its multiple front outfits, technology and materials to build its nuclear programme, according to declassified documents, analyses and news reports.

On the other hand, Pakistan’s clandestine efforts at theft were led by a one-man army, the late nuclear physicist Abdul Qadeer Khan.

Kennedy’s Concerns

It was the Israelis who did it first, according to American documents that cover the whole ambit of secret parlays and shady routes through which Tel Aviv launched its endeavour to create a nuclear programme starting in the late 1950s and the 1960s, fuelling deep concerns in the White House, especially when John F Kennedy was President. Kennedy was the only American president who opposed the plan tooth and nail, although his successors more or less connived at it.

The Israeli “cover stories” about its nuclear reactor dismayed top-level American officials who saw a “clearly apparent lack of candour”, write Avner Cohen and William Burr of the George Washington University in a post they published on April 15, 2015, in the National Security Archive’s Nuclear Documentation Project.

As stated earlier, the corporation under target for both Israel and Pakistan was Urenco, the European uranium enrichment consortium set up in 1970 to address the erstwhile Soviet Union’s anxieties about Germany alone having a national enrichment programme. As a result, the newly created corporation, jointly owned by Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, could send supplies to nuclear power plants of Middle Eastern countries on condition that the enriched uranium produced was used only for peaceful purposes.

Lekem, which had been active much earlier, managed to secure, according to declassified US documents and reports in the Guardian newspaper, the vital uranium-enrichment technology by bribing a German Urenco executive. The operation was done in typical Mossad style, wherein photographs of the nuclear enrichment “centrifuge blueprints” were “mislaid” by the executive in his kitchen, which the Israelis stole.

The same blueprints were years later stolen by Abdul Qadeer Khan, who used them to single-handedly found Pakistan’s enrichment programme as well as to set up a global nuclear smuggling business for which he was later found guilty.

Celebrity Links

Lekem had on its roll names as famous as Arnon Milchan, the Hollywood producer who went on to produce films such as Pretty Woman, LA Confidential, Fight Club, JFK, 12 Years a Slave and others, all starring A-listers in the American film industry.

Meir Doron and Joseph Gelman, authors of Milchan’s unauthorised biography titled Confidential: The Life of Secret Agent Turned Hollywood Tycoon Arnon Milchan (2011), dwell on what the man thought were his “patriotic” efforts: “One of his (Milchan’s) many objectives was to secure the design for centrifuges, (back then) a new and highly secret method of enriching uranium. The primary manufacturer of centrifuges in the world was Urenco Ltd, a firm based in Jülich, Germany.”

The book quotes Dr Avner Cohen, a nuclear proliferation expert, as saying that Israel had started experimenting with centrifuges in the early- to mid-1960s. However, it took them a while, at least a decade, to master the technology. The authors state that, in fact, Israel never entirely mastered centrifuge technology on its own.

“Only after secretly obtaining the Urenco centrifuge blueprints in the early 1970s, from a senior Urenco executive, did Israel finally take command of the technology. Money was exchanged, the blueprints were ‘misplaced’ and later found, but not before copies were made, which miraculously appeared on Benjamin Blumberg’s desk in Tel Aviv. Mission accomplished.” Blumberg was head of the Office for Special Tasks, an intel agency created to safeguard the work-in-progress nuclear programme.

The authors also write jokingly that Israel’s Machon-8 (machon in Hebrew stands for facility), with its thousands of spinning centrifuges, might justifiably be called “Machon Milchan”. The reference is to a specific institute within Israel’s Dimona nuclear facility, or the Shimon Peres Negev Nuclear Research Center, which is at the heart of the Jewish state’s undeclared nuclear weapons programme.

Doron and Gelman also write in their book that “it’s noteworthy that shortly after Israel secured centrifuge technology from Urenco, Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of the Pakistani bomb, who then worked at one of Urenco’s affiliated labs in Holland (the Netherlands), also secured the same designs for Pakistan, and later sold them to Iran and North Korea.” They rightly point out that Dr Khan’s theft and later proliferation represented the single worst security breach relating to nuclear weapons technology since the dawn of the atomic age.

The Whistleblower

The man who spilled the beans about Israel’s nuclear weapons programme was Mordechai Vanunu, former nuclear technician at the Dimona facility, who disclosed details of Israel’s nuclear programme to the British press in 1986. He paid a huge price for it: he was first lured by a female Mossad agent from Britain to Rome where he was drugged and kidnapped and ultimately convicted in a behind-closed-doors trial. Vanunu had to spend 18 years in prison, 11 of them in solitary confinement.

As regards Khan, Adrian Levy, author of Deception: Pakistan, the United States, and the Secret Trade in Nuclear Weapons (2008), calls him the face of the nuclear programme of Pakistan who embraced a tragi-comic fate – a man who was absolutely at one with the state, but was sacrificed by it so that the state could survive. After his sinister role in nuclear-arming other countries was revealed, then Pakistan President General Pervez Musharraf in 2004 “made him fall on his sword so his pact with the US would continue. AQK (Khan) agreed,” Levy had told Open in an interview shortly after Khan’s death in 2021.

For Levy, Khan was the instigator and motivator, but not the father of the Pakistan bomb. After all, he was only a metallurgist. “The accolade goes to the scientists in Pakistan who were eclipsed by AQK and his larger-than-life public persona. What AQK brought was his sense of hope, his patriotism, and his real sense of purpose. Unable to keep a secret, he frequently blew parts of the secret programme to journalists who courted him knowing he was unable to keep himself out of a story. He was truly an extraordinary emissary for Pakistan, but then allowed himself to be manipulated—willingly—into becoming a re-supplier, shipping out schematics and parts to other nations,” Levy had said.

Pakistan-based nuclear physicist and activist Professor Pervez Hoodbhoy, who said he had to “suffer” at the hands of Khan, had told Open earlier that he has not an iota of respect for him. “He (AQK) was a man greedy for wealth and had amassed a fortune by the time he died. By being among the first settlers of Bani Gala, he started the environmental destruction of Rawal Lake, which supplies Rawalpindi city with drinking water. In 1996, he attempted to join in the theft of public land via a scheme started by Benazir Bhutto, who sought to give Quaid-i-Azam University’s land to influential people. AQK had me put on the Exit Control List (ECL) for opposing the theft.” Those on the ECL can’t leave the country. It is a provision mostly used to prevent drug lords and other criminals from running away. “He could do that because he was one of the most powerful men in Pakistan,” Hoodbhoy recalled.

Fall from Grace

Later, according to Hoodbhoy, Khan felt he had been made the fall guy by Musharraf, and that influential generals were let off the hook. All that and more were revealed by AQK in a 2008 letter he wrote to Hoodbhoy. It is true, therefore, that in death, although Pakistan feted him as a great saviour and a national hero, the 85-year-old, who lost the battle to Covid-19, died a deeply frustrated man.

Milchan, too, despite being a billionaire and aged 80, has been charged with bribing the current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to get tax benefits in Israel. He hasn’t visited his home country since 2016. In fact, Milchan was recruited in 1965 by the late Shimon Peres, who later became Israeli prime minister (as well as its president), to play a central role in Israel’s clandestine acquisition programmes.

Lekem, which played a pivotal role in making Israel a nuclear power, was disbanded in 1986 following the arrest of Jonathan Pollard, a US Navy intelligence officer, who had spied for Israel and was later sentenced to 30 years in prison. However, in late 2020, he flew back and was received at the airport by Netanyahu, who offered the former spy an Israeli ID card.

Interestingly, Israel had received help for its nuclear programme from multiple countries, including France and Norway, some of them now at the forefront of advocacy for non-proliferation. American state documents show that Western governments have played along with the policy of “opacity” as regards Israel’s nuclear programme, although the country had violated treaties banning nuclear tests and several other national and international laws restricting the traffic in nuclear materials and technology.

Double Standards

According to the Guardian, the list of nations that secretly sold Israel the material and expertise to make nuclear warheads, or who turned a blind eye to its theft, ironically, includes some of the staunchest campaigners against proliferation: the US, France, Germany, Britain and Norway.

Israel also notoriously aided nuclear proliferation, like Pakistan did with several countries (including North Korea), by helping even South Africa’s erstwhile apartheid regime in developing its own bomb in the 1970s in return for selling uranium oxide, a key component in making a nuclear weapon.

While Pakistan flaunts its nuclear-power status arguably as a deterrent, Israel has, historically, gone several steps ahead, destroying efforts by its neighbours in the Middle East to build a nuclear bomb and acquire nuclear deterrence, calling any such effort an existential threat to the country.

Arnon MilchanDavid Ben-GurionDr Abdul Qadeer KhanIranIsraelJohn F KennedyNuclear programmeShimon Peres