How Israel Stole the Bomb
By James DiEugenio | Consortium News | September 11, 2016
In 1968, CIA Director Richard Helms was presented with a disturbing National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) stating that Israel had obtained atomic weapons, a dangerous development that occurred earlier than the CIA had anticipated.
It was particularly dangerous because just the year before, the Six Day War had marked the beginning of open hostilities between the Israelis and Arab nation states. To prevail, Israel had launched preemptive air attacks against Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Iraq at the start of the conflict. Considering that violent backdrop, Helms immediately arranged a meeting with President Lyndon Johnson to inform him of this troubling milestone.
CIA Director Richard Helms
The man who had prepared the NIE and gave it to Helms was the CIA’s chief science and technology officer, Carl Duckett. After Helms met with Johnson, the CIA Director told Duckett about the President’s rather odd reaction. LBJ did not get upset, and he did not order an investigation into how it happened. Further, he did not tell Helms to let both the Defense Department and State Department know about it so they could establish intelligence inquiries or consider sanctions.
Instead, Johnson did the opposite. He told Helms to keep the news secret and specifically told the Director not to let the secretaries of State or Defense know about it.
Helms obeyed the orders of his Commander in Chief, but he decided to talk to the FBI about how this development had occurred earlier than expected. Thus begins Roger Mattson’s Stealing the Atom Bomb: How Denial and Deception Armed Israel, the riveting story of duplicity, betrayal, cover-ups and deceit.
As the book shows, the cover-ups and duplicity did not just come from Israel and its agents in America. The deceit also came from men inside the American government who, for whatever reasons, decided to cast a blind eye on what was really happening under their jurisdiction, even after they had been alerted to it.
What Mattson reveals is no less than an atomic heist – one that could have been prevented if men in high positions had done their duty.
Highly Enriched Uranium
After Johnson told Helms not to tell State or Defense, the CIA Director called Attorney General Ramsey Clark, because what made this news even more ominous — and a potential crime — was what the CIA had discovered when it conducted a chemical test around the Israeli nuclear reactor at Dimona, in the Negev desert.
U.S. AG Ramsey Clark with Lyndon Johnson in 1967
Duckett had concluded that Israel had something that they should not have possessed at that time: HEU, or highly enriched uranium, which could only be produced by one of the five major powers that already had nuclear weapons.
But the test had also revealed characteristics that showed the material had originated in the United States. (Mattson, p. 97) Specifically, the HEU came from Portsmouth, Ohio and then was further processed at a plant in Apollo, Pennsylvania.
The importance of this information was that the HEU was processed to such a degree – well over 90 percent U 235 – that it was classified as weapons grade uranium. The technical term for it is the acronym SNM, or Special Nuclear Material, meaning that it is fissile: it can easily be split with neutrons. Although the Portsmouth plant is shut down today, beginning in 1956 it did produce weapons-grade uranium.
It was in Apollo, Pennsylvania, that the trail of the SNM and the crime of its diversion becomes exceedingly suspect. The plant that did the further processing of HEU, and the ultimate shipping, was named Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation, or NUMEC, and there were a number of reasons why suspicion had centered on NUMEC even before Helms called Clark.
First, NUMEC had a rather unreliable record when it came to keeping track of HEU and other materials that had been given to it through the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). The way the system worked is that the particular company would forward its business requests — from either private or governmental agencies — to the AEC. The AEC would then estimate how much nuclear material NUMEC would need to fulfill the contract. If a company was using up more material than the AEC properly estimated, that company would be fined quite a lot of money. If the shortages persisted, the AEC and the FBI could then open up an investigation.
With CIA’s discoveries, the possibility presented itself that a diversion of the nuclear material could be taking place. Either someone from the outside was stealing the material, or someone on the inside was embezzling it.
As Mattson shows with charts, graphs and testimony, NUMEC had an extraordinarily bad record in this regard. The company was eventually fined over $2 million for missing materials, which, with inflation factored in, would be about $15 million today. Mattson adduces that from 1959 to 1977, about 345 kilograms of HEU went missing from NUMEC, which translates to well over 700 pounds. (ibid, p. 286)
Explaining the Deficits
In just one year, there was a loss of over 56 kilograms (or about 123 pounds). The company made up all sorts of rationales as to why this much HEU was missing, including losses during the mechanical processing. But as the author points out, there are two problems with this accounting.
First, no other plant in America reported losses of this magnitude. The AEC concluded that the losses at Apollo were more than double what they were at any other comparably sized atomic plant in the U.S. (ibid, p. 65)
Secondly, even if one chalks up some of the missing HEU to a processing loss, that still does not account for the entire record of NUMEC. Mattson figures that, even giving the company the benefit of the doubt, it still leaves about 200 pounds of missing HEU. (ibid, p. 67) That’s enough for about six atomic bombs, larger than the one used on Hiroshima.
As Mattson reports, what makes NUMEC an even more intriguing suspect is the fact that the company had some legitimate business transactions with Israel, concerning the irradiation of plants. And these legitimate packages were sent at about the time the HEU went missing. Further, the inventory records at NUMEC were extremely sloppy and some appear to have been destroyed in direct violation of the AEC code, meaning NUMEC should have been cited, but wasn’t. (ibid, p. 75)
That brings us to the founders of the NUMEC plant in Apollo, Pennsylvania, a small town of approximately 1,600 people that lies about 30 miles northeast of Pittsburgh. In 1955, the Apollo Steel Plant was purchased by David Lowenthal. Two years later, Lowenthal and Zalman Shapiro cooperated in forming NUMEC.
Shapiro, a very accomplished metallurgist who lived next door to Lowenthal, had been employed for a number of years at the nearby Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory, which supported the AEC’s Office of Naval Reactors.
In May 1958, Lowenthal merged Apollo Steel with the San Toy Mining Company in Maine. San Toy then changed its name to Apollo Industries, with the main operating officers of this new corporation Morton Chatkin, Ivan Novick and Lowenthal. (ibid, p. 43)
The board comprised these three men plus Shapiro, and later others. In the early 1960s, the steel plant’s name was changed to Raychord Steel, but with the decline of the steel industry, Raychord became a subsidiary company to Apollo.
Ties to Zionist Groups
Novick, one of Apollo’s officers, later served as national president of the Zionist Organization of America, in which Chatkin, another officer, also held a leadership role. The ZOA was a member group of the American Zionist Council, which later became the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which today is considered to be the leading lobbying group for Israel and one of the most powerful lobbying groups in Washington.
Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin
Novick also later served as a personal liaison between Ronald Reagan’s White House and the administration of Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin.
Lowenthal, who was born in Poland in 1921, came to America in 1932 and served in the American armed forces in World War II, eventually becoming a citizen in 1945. After the war, he worked with the Haganah, the Jewish paramilitary force inside Palestine, on the Zionist mission to ferry Jews into Palestine in 1947 on board the boat SS Exodus.
Since almost none of the passengers had legal immigration certificates to enter Palestine, the British Royal Navy, which ran the Palestinian Mandate, seized the ship and deported its passengers back to Europe. Lowenthal’s mission was a practical failure, but a tremendous propaganda success for the Zionist cause. The event was novelized by author Leon Uris in the number-one best-selling book Exodus, which was published in 1958 and was made into a movie two years later by director Otto Preminger, starring Paul Newman.
Lowenthal later served on board the ship Pan York, which also attempted to evade the British quarantine but was captured in Cyprus with the crew arrested, including Lowenthal. He escaped and fled to Palestine where he served with the Haganah during the war that broke out there in 1948 after the British abandoned the mandate early. (ibid, p. 44)
Lowenthal ended up serving under the legendary Meir Amit, the leading intelligence officer in Israel during the 1960s. Lowenthal was also personally acquainted with future prime ministers David Ben Gurion and Golda Meir.
Nuclear Experience
Shapiro, who had advanced degrees in chemistry and metallurgy from Johns Hopkins, worked for Westinghouse and the Navy on the nuclear reactor that powered America’s first atomic submarine, the Nautilus. Shapiro also helped develop the fuel for the first commercial nuclear reactor, the Shippingport Atomic Power Station in Pennsylvania.
Like Lowenthal, Novick and Chatkin, Shapiro also was active in supporting Israeli causes, although his activities had a slightly educational tone. He was a member of the Technion Society, which supported advances in Israeli science and technology. Indeed, he became an Honorary Life Member of the group.
He also was a Director of Hillel, an international organization that tries to acquaint Jewish students with each other on campuses and organize student trips to Israel. Like Novick and Chatkin, he was a member of the Zionist Organization of America. Many years later, it was discovered that Shapiro was on the Board of Governors of the Israeli Intelligence Center, which honors spies for Israel who clandestinely advanced the interests of the state. (Mattson, p. 84)
Beyond the individual backgrounds of these four men, there was also something else which should have attracted the U.S. intelligence community’s attention prior to Helms’s meeting with President Johnson. While running NUMEC, both men – Shapiro and Lowenthal – were taking trips to Israel and had contacts with high officials of Israeli intelligence as well as Israel’s version of the AEC.
Further, NUMEC had a guest worker, an Israeli metallurgist, in its plant, as part of an agreement NUMEC had with Israel to serve as a training consultancy which resulted in the formation of a joint company with Israel called ISORAD that initially was to deal with irradiation of citrus fruits through gamma rays. But the FBI later discovered that NUMEC also had contracts with Israel for the development of plutonium oxide as fuel elements in nuclear reactors. (Mattson, pgs. 80-81)
Since Lowenthal had so many acquaintances in high positions, he often visited Israel, including a most curious instance at about the time he purchased Apollo Steel in 1956. It was at this time that Israel was making decisions about foreign sourcing for nuclear materials and technology.
A year later, NUMEC was formed and Shapiro immediately applied for a license from the AEC to process uranium fuel in a building formerly occupied by Apollo Steel. John Hadden, CIA station chief in Tel Aviv, later noted the unusual coincidence of these events on two continents. (ibid, p. 45)
Israeli Visits
Israel’s Dimona nuclear weapons plant
But declassified FBI files reveal that the visitations were not just one way, i.e. from Apollo, Pennsylvania, to Israel. There were also visits and meetings of Israeli officials who went to Apollo.
At the time of those meetings, there were four main branches of Israeli intelligence. The Shin Bet corresponded with the Federal Bureau of Investigation; the Mossad with the Central Intelligence Agency; the Aman roughly with the Defense Intelligence Agency; and the LAKAM, which was responsible for security at Dimona and for procuring scientific and technological data from Western sources. (Mattson, p. 108)
In the mid-1960s, France started scaling back its support for the Dimona reactor, which was supposedly a research facility. With France’s pullback, LAKAM began seeking out and purchasing parts and supplies from other sources to complete the project.
LAKAM’s job included concealing the reactor’s true function – the development of a nuclear bomb – from American inspections. (ibid) During an American inspection in 1964, LAKAM even created a “Potemkin village” control room to deceive the visitors.
Unlike American intelligence, Israel also had a special operations unit that served all branches. Established in 1957, it was run by Rafi Eitan and his deputy, Avraham Bendor. (In the 1980s, Eitan became notorious for the Jonathan Pollard spy case, in which Pollard, a navy intelligence employee, was paid tens of thousands of dollars to spy for Israel in the United States with Eitan his ultimate control agent.)
In September 1968, the AEC told the FBI that they were giving permission to NUMEC for a visit by four Israelis, including Eitan and Bendor. However, in the application to the AEC, the occupations of the two were disguised. Eitan was said to be a chemist in the Defense Ministry; Bendor supposedly worked for the electronics division. (ibid, p. 110)
Convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard
The other two men were Avraham Hermoni, who was billed as a Scientific Counselor in the Israeli Embassy in Washington, and Dr. Ephraim Biegun, described as working in the Division of Electronics for Defense. Again, this was misleading. Hermoni did, at times, work out of Washington’s Israeli Embassy, but his prime and most important function was overseeing and planning Israel’s nuclear weapons program, which he did from 1959-69. Biegun was actually head of the technical division of the Mossad from 1960-70.
CIA Suspicions
After the visit, NUMEC reported that the four men were in Apollo to buy thermo-electrical generator systems. (ibid, p. 119) Why Eitan and Bendor had to be there for that purpose is not readily apparent.
CIA officer John Hadden thought the real reason for the visit was that Shapiro was divulging top-secret technical information about plutonium manufacture – and that he was aided in this by the visiting Israeli scientist working at NUMEC. The FBI later came to agree that this was most likely the true reason for the visit. (ibid, p. 120)
Hermoni revisited Shapiro in November 1968, but the capstone to the visits to Apollo came later that month. As noted previously, France had cut back on its support for Dimona in the mid-1960s, halting the supply of uranium fuel in 1967.
In late November 1968, the Mossad arranged a covert operation called Operation Plumbat, which employed a front company in West Germany to purchase 200 tons of uranium yellowcake from Belgium. The transaction was approved by Euratom, the European organization controlling such transactions, but once the transport ship set sail for the port of Genoa, Italy, it was intercepted by another ship used by the Mossad. When the original ship reached port, the hull was empty.
The timing of this operation, on the heels of the mysterious visits by Israeli intelligence agents to Apollo, seems to constitute powerful circumstantial evidence of Israeli intentions.
Then, right after the completion of the Plumbat mission, who arrived in Israel? None other than Zalman Shapiro. The FBI discovered that in November 1968, in addition to the personal visits, Shapiro was in frequent phone contact with a number of Israeli intelligence agents, including Hermoni. (Mattson, p. 126)
A Longstanding Goal
Israel’s long trail of subterfuge and duplicity was part of a longstanding goal. As early as 1948, David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, stated that what Einstein, Teller and Oppenheimer did for America, they could easily do for Israel, since they were all Jews. In fact, he offered Einstein Israeli citizenship, which the great man declined. (ibid, p. 22) Ben-Gurion then had two meetings with Oppenheimer and numerous ones with Teller.
David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first PM
Ultimately, Israel settled on David Bergmann, a brilliant chemist whom Ben-Gurion appointed first chief of the Israel Atomic Energy Commission in 1952. By 1955, Bergmann was essentially running the day-to-day operations of Israel’s atomic program.
In a conversation with the American ambassador, Bergmann said the Israeli science education program was adequate in physics and chemistry but weak in engineering and non-existent in metallurgy. He also revealed that the design he had laid out for a reactor was the same as the one at Shippingport, Pennsylvania, an intriguing clue because Shapiro was a metallurgist and had worked on the Shippingport power station.
Indeed, Shapiro eventually met Bergmann and the two became close friends and colleagues, serving on the board of ISORAD, which was a joint venture of NUMEC and the IAEC. Bergmann made his first visit to America for IAEC in 1956, the year before Lowenthal turned Apollo Steel into NUMEC.
There were two significant investigations of Shapiro and NUMEC. The first was instigated by Dick Helms’s call to Ramsey Clark in 1968 and the discovery of the highly enriched uranium at Dimona. (Mattson, p. 99) The second began in 1976 when Jim Conran, a whistleblower at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, voiced complaints about the background and actions of Shapiro. Conran was a security officer and his warnings eventually got the attention of the White House. (ibid, p. 161)
During the first investigation, the FBI could not find enough evidence to justify a violation by Shapiro of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which mandates that any person in the U.S. who is representing a foreign country’s interests has to register with the Justice Department. But the FBI did recommend cancelling Shapiro’s security clearances, based on wiretaps that revealed Shapiro in close contact with Israeli intelligence officials and with members of the IAEC. (ibid, p. 138)
During these calls Shapiro reportedly said he would help Israel in any way that he could. He also expressed frustration with the new ownership at NUMEC, which had been purchased by ARCO. But his Israeli contacts said he was too valuable to leave and encouraged him to stay there. (ibid, p. 139)
FBI Surveillance
One of the most curious episodes that the FBI surveillance revealed was a meeting between Shapiro and a man named Jeruham Kafkafi, a suspected Mossad officer working under diplomatic cover. He had left Washington by air on the morning of June 20, 1969, and met Shapiro at the Pittsburgh airport for about an hour. He then left and flew back to Washington.
As a result of that surveillance, Shapiro was interviewed by the AEC in August 1969, with some of Shapiro’s answers to questions rather dubious. For instance, he said he did not know Hermoni was in charge of the Israeli nuclear development program and thought he was a university professor. Shapiro said his discussions in September and October 1968 with the Israeli officers were about water contamination, saboteur detection and military activities.
When asked why the Israelis could not have talked to the Defense Department about those topics, Shapiro had no answer. The interviewer wrote in his summary that Shapiro was cool and calm throughout except when the Kafkafi meeting was brought up. At first, Shapiro said he could not recall it, even though it happened just two months earlier. He then said he did remember it, claiming it was about an overdue invoice and a power supply resource. (p. 142)
The AEC investigators did not find the last reply credible, since it did not seem to justify an airline flight from Washington to Pittsburgh and back. Shapiro adjusted his answer by saying that there was some discussion of an investigator whom he knew from America who was going to visit Israel. He also added the figure of $32,000 as to how much Israel owed NUMEC. As Mattson notes, again, this explanation does not seem to justify an air flight and an hour-long meeting with a clandestine Mossad officer.
Closing the Inquiry
The man who ultimately decided to close this initial inquiry was Glenn Seaborg, head of the AEC. Not only did he not see any civil or criminal charges as being viable, but when President Richard Nixon’s Attorney General John Mitchell recommended revoking Shapiro’s security clearances, Seaborg balked at that also.
Glenn Seaborg, chairman of the AEC
Mattson clearly sees Seaborg as being a villain in the piece. Late in the book, he explicitly accuses him of running a cover-up. (see p. 297) And, there is evidence to back up this charge. It was later discovered, during the second inquiry, that Seaborg had a close personal friendship with Shapiro. (ibid p. 268)
Earle Hightower, assistant director of safeguards at AEC, explicitly stated that the whole case regarding NUMEC was rigged because it was known that Seaborg would not take action. Little more than three years after Seaborg left the AEC, it was dissolved in 1975 and was replaced by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, in part, because critics accused the AEC of an insufficiently aggressive regulatory program.
The second, much longer, and more vigorous inquiry into NUMEC and Shapiro came about at the creation of the NRC when Jim Conran was tasked with reviewing the record of how safeguards had worked previously for the AEC so they could be strengthened in the future. In that review process, he came across the case of Shapiro and NUMEC.
When Conran asked to see more files on both, he was denied access, causing him to go up the NRC ladder to Chairman William Anders, who was briefed by, among others, Carl Duckett of the CIA. Since Anders was about to leave for a diplomatic post, he took his concerns to James Connor at President Gerald Ford’s White House.
In March 1976, the CIA’s Duckett addressed an informal gathering of pilots and astronauts, saying there was little doubt Israel had about 20 nuclear warheads. Although this was supposed to be off the record, the information leaked. In April 1976, Time reported that this claim was accurate, except the newsmagazine put the size of the arsenal at 13 bombs and added that the warheads could be delivered by Phantom jets or Jericho missiles.
Duckett wrote a memo to CIA Director George Bush in which he said he suspected that the Israeli program was jumpstarted by a diversion of enriched uranium from the NUMEC plant. (p. 165) He attached various appendices to the memo to show the results of previous inquiries into NUMEC and explain why his belief was justified.
One of the appendices consisted of a paper by John Hadden in which he expressed the suspicion that NUMEC was actually a shell company the Israeli government had set up for the express purpose of diverting materials, technology and information that Israel needed to speed up and facilitate its longstanding quest for atomic weapons. (ibid, p. 166)
A New Investigation
Attorney General Edward Levi was then sent a summary of the FBI’s previous investigation of NUMEC. Levi alerted Ford that he thought NUMEC was culpable for several crimes and, with Ford’s permission, he wished to begin a criminal inquiry. Since Ford’s close adviser James Connor was also disturbed by these findings, the President approved the investigation.
What followed was a tedious bureaucratic battle between the CIA and FBI. The FBI felt it did not have direct proof that a diversion had taken place, while the CIA had the proof — the chemical tests at Dimona — but was reluctant to reveal the intelligence to the FBI. Also, the CIA did not want to furnish the FBI with technical experts to help educate the investigating agents so they could effectively cross-examine important witnesses. Thus, the FBI’s inquiry dragged on through three presidents: Ford, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.
But even with these obstructions, the FBI did eventually find witnesses to a diversion from the Apollo plant. It turned out that the FBI did not do enough interviews of plant employees in its initial inquiry because there were at least four of them willing to talk. Those witnesses form the climax of Mattson’s book.
In 1980, one witness said that when he read newspaper accounts about the losses of enriched uranium at Apollo, he had to chuckle to himself. When asked why, he replied that in 1965 or 1966, he was walking near the loading dock at Apollo and saw people loading containers – the dimensions that were used for HEU packets – into equipment boxes. He noticed that the shipping papers for the boxes revealed that the packages were destined for Israel. This witness then suggested some other workers at the plant who had seen similar activity. (Ibid, p. 272)
Suspicion Shipment
One of these witnesses saw a flatbed truck backed up into the loading dock area with Shapiro pacing around the area while the driver was loading “stove pipes” into a cabinet on the truck. This struck the witness as odd because the plant had regularly assigned workers for loading duties during the day but this shipment was being prepared in the evening. He explained that “stove pipes” were cylindrical containers that the plant used to pack enriched uranium inside. Each stove pipe usually contained three or four packets of HEU.
When he glanced at the clipboard resting on a package, he saw the destination was Israel. The clipboard then was yanked away and an armed guard escorted him off the dock. He also said it was unusual to see Shapiro in this area of the plant, and further, that Shapiro was very seldom there at night. (ibid, p. 275)
There were two other witnesses who told the FBI about similar events. The FBI also interviewed an NRC inspector named James Devlin, who told the agents that, contrary to what Shapiro had said, the security at the Apollo plant was below par and that NUMEC did not employ a professional security force. The company had one regular armed guard and Devlin happened to know who he was, since he was also a deputy for the township. The only other guards were unarmed and non-uniformed. (ibid, pgs. 272-73)
By this time, the FBI did not want to continue the investigation, believing that nothing would come of it, although the Justice Department urged the investigators on. But the FBI was correct since, as Mattson notes more than once in his book, the last president who really wanted to stop Israel from becoming a nuclear power was John F. Kennedy. (See pgs. 38-40, p. 256)
Richard Helms’s conversation with a disinterested President Johnson underscores how that attitude changed after Kennedy’s death. As Mattson further notes, opposition to Israel’s nuclear-weapons program was more or less negated by President Richard Nixon’s meeting with Prime Minister Golda Meir in 1969 when he agreed that the U.S. would not make any public statements revealing Israel’s nuclear arsenal nor demand that it sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty, as long as Israel did no testing and made no public threats.
Even that policy was probably violated in 1979 with the Vela Incident: a suspected Israeli nuclear test done in the Indian Ocean.
Author Roger Mattson
Author Roger Mattson was part of the inquiry about the illegal transfer of atomic secrets to Israel, working in the NRC’s safeguards department when Conran first voiced his fears about a diversion at NUMEC. Thus, Mattson became part of an internal review of the Shapiro case, seeing firsthand how certain intelligence agencies were, by accident or design, obstructing the investigation.
Mattson concludes his important book by stating that this policy of casting a deliberate blind eye towards a nuclear heist by Israel places the U.S. in a compromised position when trying to enforce a policy of non-proliferation on other nations because of the obvious double standards.
To point out one paradox, the U.S. government executed Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for purportedly supplying nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union with less evidence. Plus, the tinder box of the Middle East is probably the last place where America should have allowed atomic weapons to proliferate, but it did.
Because of that, the U.S. has little or no moral authority on the issue today.
James DiEugenio is a researcher and writer on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and other mysteries of that era. His most recent book is Reclaiming Parkland.
Last words to the nation of Salvador Allende
Last words to the nation of Salvador Allende
Surely this will be the last opportunity for me to address you. The Air Force has bombed the towers of Radio Portales and Radio Corporación.
My words do not have bitterness but disappointment. May they be a moral punishment for those who have betrayed their oath: soldiers of Chile, titular commanders in chief, Admiral Merino, who has designated himself Commander of the Navy, and Mr. Mendoza, the despicable general who only yesterday pledged his fidelity and loyalty to the Government, and who also has appointed himself Chief of the Carabineros [national police].
Given these facts, the only thing left for me is to say to workers: I am not going to resign!
Placed in a historic transition, I will pay for loyalty to the people with my life. And I say to them that I am certain that the seed which we have planted in the good conscience of thousands and thousands of Chileans will not be shriveled forever.
They have strength and will be able to dominate us, but social processes can be arrested neither by crime nor force. History is ours, and people make history.
Workers of my country: I want to thank you for the loyalty that you always had, the confidence that you deposited in a man who was only an interpreter of great yearnings for justice, who gave his word that he would respect the Constitution and the law and did just that. At this definitive moment, the last moment when I can address you, I wish you to take advantage of the lesson: foreign capital, imperialism, together with the reaction, created the climate in which the Armed Forces broke their tradition, the tradition taught by General Schneider and reaffirmed by Commander Araya, victims of the same social sector which will today be in their homes hoping, with foreign assistance, to retake power to continue defending their profits and their privileges.
I address, above all, the modest woman of our land, the farmer who believed in us, the worker who labored more, the mother who knew our concern for children. I address professionals of Chile, patriotic professionals, those who days ago continued working against the sedition sponsored by professional associations, class-based associations that also defended the advantages which a capitalist society grants to a few.
I address the youth, those who sang and gave us their joy and their spirit of struggle. I address the man of Chile, the worker, the farmer, the intellectual, those who will be persecuted, because in our country fascism has been already present for many hours — in terrorist attacks, blowing up the bridges, cutting the railroad tracks, destroying the oil and gas pipelines, in the face of the silence of those who had the obligation to protect them. They were committed. History will judge them.
Surely Radio Magallanes will be silenced, and the calm metal instrument of my voice will no longer reach you. It does not matter. You will continue hearing it. I will always be next to you. At least my memory will be that of a man of dignity who was loyal to [inaudible] the workers.
The people must defend themselves, but they must not sacrifice themselves. The people must not let themselves be destroyed or riddled with bullets, but they cannot be humiliated either.
Workers of my country, I have faith in Chile and its destiny. Other men will overcome this dark and bitter moment when treason seeks to prevail. Go forward knowing that, sooner rather than later, the great avenues will open again where free men will walk to build a better society.
Long live Chile! Long live the people! Long live the workers!
These are my last words, and I am certain that my sacrifice will not be in vain, I am certain that, at the very least, it will be a moral lesson that will punish felony, cowardice, and treason.
CIA Continues to Cover Up Its Involvement in Chile’s 9/11 Coup
Victim of one the many coups on democracy carried out by the United States: Salvador Allende
teleSUR | September 9, 2016
Though intelligence documents from the 1973 coup period have been declassified since 1999, the CIA continues to censor them.
The CIA continues to withhold information on its involvement in the Sept. 11, 1973 coup that led to the death of President Salvador Allende in Chile, followed by a deadly dictatorship, according to documents posted Friday by the National Security Archive.
In the list of published documents, the section regarding Chile is censored. The President’s Daily Briefs, the intelligence reports given daily to the U.S. president, in particular former President Richard Nixon days before Allende’s death, were among those censored.
According to Peter Kornbluh, director of the Archive’s Chile Documentation Project, censorship on this issue makes no sense since the intelligence agency has officially acknowledged its ties to those who plotted the coup from inside the Chilean military, and declassified several intelligence reports since.
“The CIA is trying—but failing—to hold history hostage,” Kornbluh said. “The CIA is attempting to cover up what Nixon knew about coup plotting in Chile and when he knew it, as well as hiding the CIA’s own contacts and connections to the coup plotters.”
According to the documents, three days before the coup—and on the day of the coup—the CIA gave Nixon an intelligence report on the progress of the efforts inside the Chilean military to overthrow Allende, a socialist.
In one document, a CIA operative in Santiago named Jack Devine identifies the new date of the planned coup for the next day, September 11, and confirms all three branches of the Chilean armed forces along with the police “are involved in this action.”
The same sources told the CIA that General Augusto Pinochet, who would later become a dictator with the support of the U.S., was in communication with Air Force General Gustavo Leigh about the planned coup. The Air Force would later bomb La Moneda presidential palace, where Allende and his closest allies were on Sept. 11.
The CIA told the White House that a “key officer” in the coup attempt requested U.S. assistance in case the Chilean military encountered any resistance, according to the documents.
Kornbluh said his institution would press for the release of the censored information.
“The documents provided to Richard Nixon on Chile can and should be released for the sanctity of the historical record. The public has a right to know what the President knew, and when he knew it,” he said.
The Facts Of 9/11 Must Be Suppressed
The towers didn’t fall down. They blew up.
Winter Patriot | September 10, 2016
One day when I had nothing to do, I watched a video in which John McMurtry tried to explain why the facts of 9/11 are suppressed.
McMurtry expresses himself in long sequences of long words, in complex paragraphs peppered with academic jargon but no explanation of what these specialized words mean. It’s easy to see why they call him “Professor.”
The video runs for almost an hour, and I suppose he finally comes to a coherent point, but I can’t tell you for sure, because I fell asleep long before the end. But that’s probably all right, because I must have needed the sleep.
I don’t mean to be harsh on Professor McMurtry, for I admire what he’s doing. Too few of our smartest people have said in public what they all must know in private: that the official story of 9/11 is impossible to believe if you know anything at all about it.
It seems to me that those with academic credentials ought to be leaders in all realms of thought, especially the search for truth, and certainly including the truth about 9/11. Too many of them have failed us by pretending we already have the truth, when clearly we don’t.
I give Professor McMurtry a world of credit for standing up and speaking out. I only wish we could all understand what he has to say.
~~~
Why the Facts of 9/11 Must be Suppressed
I have my own notion of why the facts of 9/11 must be suppressed, and I can explain it in five short paragraphs:
(1) The official story of 9/11 has been used to justify drastic military actions by the United States and its allies, actions which have brought death, destruction, and chaos to Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Libya, Syria, Pakistan, and many other countries.
(2) The same story has also been used to justify drastic changes in domestic policy, in the United States and in much of the world. These changes have resulted in the persecution, incarceration, torture, and death of many innocent people, not to mention the erosion of civil rights and the perversion of the democratic process in every nation that once enjoyed these things.
(3) If it were widely and clearly understood that the official story of 9/11 is not only obviously false but a carefully crafted fiction, the military actions described above would be seen as unjustified acts of mass murder, war crimes and crimes against humanity; the policy changes would be seen as acts of treason; the people responsible for these actions might be in danger of accountability; and the new policies themselves might even be in danger of reversal, in which case the people who benefit from these policies might need to find a new way to feed at the public trough.
(4) If the official story were true, the facts of 9/11 would support it, and independent research would confirm it. Therefore the facts would be widely publicized and independent researchers would be encouraged. But none of this is happening, and that’s because the facts of 9/11 undermine the official story, and the independent researchers destroy it.
(5) Therefore the facts and the independent researchers must both be suppressed. Otherwise the new policies would be in danger, the people who implemented them would be in danger, the people who profit from them would be slightly inconvenienced, and the perpetrators of 9/11 might actually be brought to justice.
~~~
Some Facts of 9/11 that Must Be Suppressed
We now come to the part of the story that cannot be told in an hour, or even six hours.
The following list contains some facts of 9/11 that defenders of the official story wish you didn’t know, some questions they wish you wouldn’t ask, some thoughts they wish you wouldn’t entertain, some conclusions they wish you wouldn’t draw … and some hints that could help you talk yourself out of taking it seriously, which is exactly what they want you to do.
— It is not unthinkable, unknown, or even uncommon for a government to attack its own people, blame the attack on an enemy, and use the attack as a pretext for a war which would otherwise be considered unjustified. Such an attack is often called a “False Flag” attack, and the trick has been played again and again throughout American History. Fortunately, most Americans are well-enough educated to be virtually unaware of history, so they can’t even imagine such a thing.
— In 2000, a think tank called the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) published a position paper called “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” (RAD) which called for enormous and rapid increases in US military spending in order to secure “full spectrum dominance” over the entire world, but noted that “the process of transformation is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event, like a new Pearl Harbor.” Of course, having called for a major attack, they sat back and waited to see what would happen.
— A year later, following the theft of the 2000 Presidential election, several PNAC members, signatories of RAD, occupied key positions in the Bush administration, including Dick Cheney as Vice President, Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense, and Paul Wolfowitz as Assistant Secretary of Defense. These men were perfectly positioned to prevent the attacks, if they had wanted to do so. They were also legally obligated to prevent them, whether they wanted to do so or not. But patriotic Americans are smart enough not to know this.
— In July of 2001, the Italian city of Genoa hosted an international economic summit. The Italian government, fearing a potential terrorist attack, installed anti-aircraft batteries around the city. What could this mean? If your mind was warped, you might think that since no terrorist group has an air force, the Italians must have been worried about terrorists flying hijacked airplanes.
— During the Genoa summit, President Bush and the rest of the American delegation didn’t sleep at the hotel with all the other delegates. They stayed on an aircraft carrier offshore, where anti-aircraft security was even better. If you’ve had too much to drink, you might assume the Americans were even more worried than the Italians.
— Less than two months later, Bush and others in his administration claimed to have been caught by surprise, and said no one could have imagined terrorists using a hijacked airplane to attack a building. And you might wonder: if they were so afraid of it in July, why couldn’t they imagine it in September? But that’s a lunatic thought.
— According to the official timelines, the FBI knew the names of all 19 hijackers before the FAA knew that 4 airplanes had been hijacked. You might ask yourself how the FBI knew the identity of the hijackers before the FAA knew the planes had been hijacked, but only if you were hallucinating.
— We have never seen any credible video evidence that any of the 19 hijackers were in any of the airports from which the hijacked flights originated, on the day of the attacks. Shortly after the attacks, FBI agents were reportedly working double-shifts, scanning the airport security videos for signs of the hijackers. But later, we were told no security videos from those airports were available, because their recording systems had failed. If you were unreasonably suspicious, you might wonder whether this was true.
— Shortly after the FBI identified the dead hijackers, at least six of them contacted major news agencies to say that they were still alive, that they’d had nothing to do with the attacks, and that they were surprised to see their names and faces on the news. The FBI never changed its original list, nor did it acknowledge that its list could not possibly be correct. But fixation on such minor details is a sure sign of mental illness.
— The World Trade Center complex consisted of seven buildings, and all seven were destroyed on 9/11, although only the Twin Towers (Buildings 1 and 2) made an impact on the news cycle. But it would be silly to think the other 5 buildings were deliberately ignored.
— The official report of the 9/11 Commission, which claims to be a complete account of the events of the day, fails to mention the destruction of Buildings 3, 4, 5, and 6, which were also never mentioned in any official reports. This is only to be expected, because these buildings were less than 100 stories tall.
— The 9/11 Commission also failed to mention the destruction of Building 7, which was the subject of a subsequent NIST report. The existence of the NIST report proves beyond any doubt that the 9/11 Commission did not tell us the whole story, although the Commission specifically claimed to have done so. But nobody in his right mind would be concerned about such an irrelevant detail.
— The destruction of Building 7 was reported by both BBC and CNN, more than twenty minutes before it happened. To this day we have had no credible explanation for how this could have happened. But only a crackpot would expect or require one.
— The jumbo jet that allegedly hit the Pentagon left a hole much smaller than itself, but immediately after the crash, no airplane parts could be seen outside the building. If you wonder why not, you are seriously deranged.
— We were told that the plane nearly melted on impact, flowed through the small hole in a semi-liquid state, and wound up inside the building, where none of it was found because it had vaporized. And you might wonder how the plane could have melted, when all the other planes that have ever crashed, in the entire history of aviation, have crumpled and broken apart — but only if you were unhinged.
— According to the official story, the hijackers who attacked the Pentagon were identified by DNA analysis of their remains. You might be tempted to ask: What can vaporize an airplane while leaving human DNA intact? But that’s a stupid question.
— After Flight 93 crashed at Shanksville, Pennsylvania, the first responders on the scene could find no wreckage, no luggage, and no passengers. But only a fool would ask whether an airplane had crashed there at all.
— Even though the plane dove so deeply into the Shanksville soil that none of it could be seen by any of the eyewitnesses, a passport and a bandana which belonged to one of the hijackers were recovered from the scene. If you were paranoid, you might wonder whether the passport and the bandana had been planted.
— The alleged hijacker pilots could barely fly single-engine Cessnas and had no experience in the cockpits of large airliners. And yet they are said to have flown with speed and precision that our most proficient pilots cannot match. If you have no imagination, you might wonder how they did it.
— All four of the alleged flight paths are dubious, because no jumbo jet can fly at the speeds claimed by the official story (more than 500 miles per hour) except at high altitude. Such speeds are not possible at or near sea level, for planes which are not designed for it. So if you are mentally ill, you might wonder what actually hit the buildings.
— President Bush and Vice-President Cheney testified before the 9/11 Commission on terms that they themselves set: behind closed doors, together, and not under oath, with no notes or recordings permitted to be kept. Therefore the Commission may have conducted the only criminal investigation in history in which suspects were allowed to stipulate the conditions under which they would cooperate. But you won’t allow this thought to cross your mind unless you are profoundly anti-American.
— The 9/11 Commission was nominally headed by Thomas Keane and Lee Hamilton, but it was actually run by Philip Zelikow, a specialist in the creation and maintenance of public myths who came to the attention of the PNAC crowd after publishing a paper about catastrophic terrorism and the political uses to which it could be put. None but the most unbalanced would see anything wrong with this.
— Zelikow began the investigation with a detailed outline of the final report, with chapter titles, section headings, sub-headings, and even sub-sub-headings. And he did his best to keep his outline secret from the Commission staff, some of whom thought they were engaged in a legitimate investigation. But why should he have shown it around? What good would that have done?
— When an independent researcher asked why the FBI’s Most Wanted list had an entry for Osama bin Laden but did not say that he was wanted in connection with the 9/11 attacks, an FBI spokesman revealed that the FBI has no hard evidence linking bin Laden to the attacks. But hard evidence isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
— You may recall that Afghanistan was bombed, invaded, and occupied for allegedly harboring the mastermind behind the attacks. But you have never seen any evidence supporting the assertion that Osama bin Laden was connected to 9/11. The FBI would happily show you some, if it had any. But it doesn’t, so let’s not dwell on it.
— Former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds testified to Congress for more than 3 hours. When she was finished, her testimony was stricken from the record and she was hit with a State Secrets gag order. Years later, she defied that order and revealed facts which had been kept under wraps for too long, including that Osama bin Laden had enjoyed “an intimate relationship” with the CIA until 9/11. She’s what you’d call a seriously disgruntled former employee.
— An extensive body of evidence indicates that explosives were used in the destruction of the World Trade Center. This evidence includes eyewitness testimony, mainstream media news reports, forensic examination of the remaining steel, and videos in which we can see and hear explosions. According to the defenders of official story, none of this evidence exists. Clearly it would be unpatriotic, and very rude, to contradict them.
— Five of the nine 9/11 Commissioners are on record as saying they didn’t get the story right, that they had been lied to, that the Commission had been set up to fail, and so on. And another would-be Commissioner resigned at the outset, calling the Commission “a national disgrace.” But only a madman would expect such honest people to believe the story they’ve been telling.
— Five young men were seen dancing and celebrating as the attack on the WTC unfolded. They were found, arrested, and interrogated, but ten weeks later, after considerable political and diplomatic pressure, they were released, having failed multiple polygraph tests. If you have no moral compass, you might see something unseemly in this.
— It turned out that these men were Israelis and some of them were connected to the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad. After they returned to Israel, they appeared on television and explained that they were in NYC on 9/11 because “our purpose was to document the event.” You might think this indicates foreknowledge, but only if you’re anti-Semitic.
~~~
This list above is woefully incomplete, and some of the items I have omitted may be more important than any of the items I have included.
There are so many missing items that I wouldn’t have time to list them all, even if I tried. And you wouldn’t have time to read them all, either.
If I added another 20 or 50 items to the list, it would still only amount to the tip of an iceberg.
Furthermore, it could be argued that each item on my list is itself the tip of an iceberg.
For instance, the story of the five dancing Israelis is the tip of the iceberg called “Israeli complicity.” But I would have to be a raving Jew-hating anti-Semite to tell you more about that.
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Book Review
New paperback: Butchered by “Healthcare”
Lies are Unbekoming | October 20, 2026
Butchered by “Healthcare” is Robert Yoho’s plain-spoken account of how American medicine stopped being a profession and became an industry. 341 pages. Over a thousand references. Thirty-eight chapters.
“Screening Tests Are Useless”, on tests that find diseases that would never have hurt you. “The FDA Protects the Big Drug Companies”, on an agency funded by the companies it regulates. “The Journals’ Sins Are the Editors’ Sins”, on ghostwritten studies and captured peer review. “Opioids and ‘Pain Management’”, on how a generation was prescribed its way into addiction. “Prozac and Relatives” and “Antipsychotics Are Disastrous”, on what psychiatry does to adults and children. “Surgery: Money Before Patients”. “Failed Cancer Treatments”. “Futile CPR and Overprescribing”. “Billing Scams & Specialty Warfare”. “Hospitals Are Sharks”. Each with a Patient Tips section at the end on how to survive it.
If you have ever walked out of a doctor’s office with a prescription you didn’t ask for, or watched a parent put through a treatment that made them worse, this is the book you want on your shelf before the next appointment. … Full review
Butchered by “Healthcare” is available on Lulu now.
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