A Presidential Gift
After the Six-Day War, and despite Israeli complaints about the increased Soviet threat in the Middle East, the Johnson administration turned out once again to be a fitful ally in Israel’s eyes, as the President—anxious to avoid a break with the Arab world—joined de Gaulle and embargoed all arms deliveries to Israel for 135 days. America did so, bitter Israelis noted, while the Soviets continued to resupply their allies. Johnson also publicly eschewed any firm commitment to defend Israel in a crisis. He was asked by CBS newsman Dan Rather at an end-of-the-year press conference whether the United States had “the same kind of unwavering commitment to defend Israel against invasion as we have in South Vietnam.” His answer satisfied few Israelis: “We have made clear our very definite interest in Israel, and our desire to preserve peace in that area of the world by many means. But we do not have a mutual security treaty with them, as we do in Southeast Asia.”
Nonetheless, Prime Minister Eshkol was eager to make a second state visit to Washington in January 1968 to plead for the sale of F-4 jet fighters to balance the Soviet introduction of MiGs into Egypt. The F-4 was the most advanced fighter in the American arsenal, and the Pentagon and State Department argued that Israel did not need such aircraft to maintain a military advantage against the Egyptians, whose MiG-21s had a much more limited range and bombing capacity. Introducing the top-of-the-line F-4s into the Middle East would be an unwarranted and unnecessary escalation; Israel would remain superior with the previously supplied A-4 Skyhawk bombers.
But Johnson, or some of his senior staff, apparently still hadn’t given up on persuading Israel to accept the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) and were willing to trade fifty F-4s for it. In a pre-summit memorandum for Johnson on January 5, 1968, Walt Rostow discussed two lists—“What We Want” and “What We’ll Give.” The want list included the Rostow reminder “We think we have an acceptable NPT. We believe this will serve Israel’s long-range security. We expect Israel to sign.” The give list included twenty-seven more Skyhawks and a promise to “cut lead time if Israel needs Phantoms.”
Rostow’s suggestion that it would be possible to link the Phantom sale to the NPT was farcical, given Israel’s commitment to Dimona and the ample U.S. intelligence—much of it supplied by Wally Barbour’s embassy in Tel Aviv—about that commitment. Many years later, in an interview, Rostow acknowledged that he had had few doubts about Israel’s nuclear goals: “If you were to ask me what I thought in the sixties, I thought they were moving to put themselves in a position to have a bomb. Everybody and his brother knew what Israel was doing.”
There was a similar lack of realism in the White House’s approach to the broader Middle East picture, as summarized in Rostow’s January 5 memorandum: “[W]e can’t support an Israel that sits tight.… The Arabs need hope of Israeli concessions—on refugees, Jerusalem, letting new refugees return to the West Bank, avoiding permanent moves in occupied lands.” The issues would stay the same for at least the next twenty-three years.
Rostow had to know that the Israeli military had gone on a virtual rampage at the end of the Six-Day War in the newly occupied areas of Jerusalem, the West Bank and Golan Heights, ransacking and destroying Arab homes in an obvious attempt to drive Palestinians and other Arabs off their land and into Jordan and Syria. More than one hundred Arab homes were demolished in the Old City of Jersualem on the first night after the war by Israeli troops, operating under floodlights with bulldozers. Teddy Kollek, Jerusalem’s mayor, explained in a 1978 memoir why such speed was necessary: “My overpowering feeling was: do it now; it may be impossible to do it later, and it must be done.” Bulldozers and dynamite were used with especial ferocity throughout the West Bank; the village of Qalqiliya, west of Nablus, had 850 of its 2,000 homes destroyed during three days of Israel occupation. Moshe Dayan later accused the Israeli soldiers of taking “punitive” action in the village and ordered cement and other goods to be provided to the villagers for rebuilding.
There was a brief period after the war in which many senior Israelis, among them Dayan and David Ben-Gurion, openly questioned the wisdom of holding on to the occupied lands.* They saw the war as offering Israel a chance to trade land for lasting peace; Jews, Ben-Gurion often said to his followers, made lousy rulers. “Sinai? … Gaza? The West Bank? Let them all go,” Ben-Gurion told an American reporter. “Peace is more important than real estate. We do not need territories.” Levi Eshkol expressed his own doubts to the visiting Abe Feinberg a few weeks after the war, saying in Yiddish, “What am I going to do with a million Arabs? They fuck like rabbits.”
Competing against those practical concerns were the religious and philosophical views of many Revisionist Zionists who believed, along with Menachem Begin and his mentor, the late Vladimir Jabotinsky, that Israel’s expansion into the West Bank was not an issue of politics, but a historical necessity; the West Bank was the birthplace of the Jewish people, and the area, part of Eretz Israel, had not been occupied during the war but “liberated.” The Revisionists’ position emerged as the government’s policy over the years. The Israeli intransigence over return of the territories, coupled with the rearmed Arabs’ desire for revenge, doomed United Nations Resolution 242, which called for Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories in return for Arab commitments of territorial integrity and peace. It had been unanimously approved by the United Nations Security Council in late November 1967.
Things couldn’t have gone worse, from the Israeli point of view, at the Johnson-Eshkol summit meeting in early 1968 at the President’s ranch in Texas. Eshkol and his advisers, including Ephraim (Effy) Evron, the Israeli ambassador to Washington, who was a Johnson favorite, had sat through a day of briefings at which a series of Senate and Defense Department officials argued against selling F-4s to Israel. “Johnson was stiffing them on the Nonproliferation Treaty,” recalled Harry C. McPherson, one of the President’s advisers. “Finally he gets up and said, ‘Let’s all go piss.’ So we all go into a huge bathroom and piss. As Johnson’s leaving he sees Effy looking hangdog. ‘What’s the matter, Effy?’ Effy said, ‘We’re not going to get our F-4s.’ ‘Oh goddam, Effy,’ Johnson said, ‘you’re going to get the F-4s. But I’m going to get something out of Eshkol. But don’t tell him.’ ”
McPherson and Evron thought that Johnson’s comment amounted to a commitment, but what Johnson wanted to get, Israel could not give. One of Dayan’s followers recalled the despair over the seemingly relentless American pressure for IAEA inspections: “We realized we were out there alone.”
Dayan’s men were too pessimistic. Israel had the best friend it could have—the President. Within weeks of the summit meeting with Eshkol, Johnson was presented with a CIA estimate concluding—for the first time—that Israel had manufactured at least four nuclear warheads. He ordered CIA Director Richard M. Helms to bury the report, and Helms obeyed the order, as he always did.
The CIA estimate was not a result of any intelligence breakthrough, explained Carl Duckett, who, by 1968, had become the Agency’s assistant director for science and technology, but arose out of a dinner he had with Edward Teller, the eminent nuclear physicist who had devoted much of his life to weapons building. Duckett had briefed Teller in the past and, as he acknowledged, stood in awe of him. Teller had arranged for the private dinner to deliver a pointed message, Duckett recalled: “He was convinced that Israel now had several weapons ready to go.” Teller explained that he had just returned from Israel—he had a sister living in Tel Aviv and was a frequent visitor there—where he had many contacts in the Israeli scientific and defense community. “He’d talked to a lot of his old friends,” Duckett said, “and he was concerned.” Teller was careful to say that he had no specific information about Israeli nuclear weapons. But it was his understanding, Teller told Duckett, that the Agency was waiting for an Israeli test before making any final assessment about Israeli nuclear capability. If so, the CIA was making a mistake. “The Israelis have it and they aren’t going to test it,” Duckett recalled Teller explaining. “They might be wrong by a few kilotons [on the yield of an untested bomb], but so what?”
Duckett was as impressed as Teller wanted him to be: “It was the most single convincing piece of evidence I got the whole time I was in the CIA.”† He reported the conversation to Helms the next morning: “I can tell you that everybody was very concerned.” The Office of Science and Technology had just distributed a top-secret estimate on nonproliferation, and Duckett decided that an update, known inside the intelligence community as a “Memo to Holders,” would be dispatched. “It was very brief,” Duckett recalled. “The conclusion was that they [the Israelis] had nuclear weapons.”
Another factor in that conclusion was the widespread belief inside the Agency that the Israelis were somehow behind the reported disappearance of some two hundred pounds of weapons-grade uranium from the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (NUMEC), a privately owned nuclear enriching plant in Apollo, Pennsylvania. The company’s owner, Zalman Mordecai Shapiro, a devout Jew with close ties to Israel, insisted that the uranium loss—first reported by Shapiro in 1965—was routine, an inevitable by-product of the difficult task of enrichment. Duckett and many others in the intelligence community thought otherwise. Duckett acknowledged that he had no evidence that Shapiro’s uranium had been diverted to Israel, but “made an assumption” that it had while preparing the updated Israeli estimate. “Assuming a crude device, Israel could have made four weapons with the Shapiro material,” Duckett said, and the initial draft of the Memo to Holders revealed that there was new evidence suggesting that Israel had three to four nuclear weapons.
Without the Teller report and the suspicions about Shapiro, Duckett acknowledged, the CIA didn’t have much to go on. The Agency had been unable to determine whether Israel had built, as suspected, an underground chemical reprocessing plant at Dimona. The Agency also had not been able to penetrate any of the military commands or intelligence services of Israel. And no Israeli had defected to the United States with nuclear information. The National Security Agency and its electronic eavesdropping also had not been much help, Duckett said, although it had provided early evidence suggesting that some Israeli Air Force pilots had practiced bomb runs in a manner that made sense only if nuclear weapons were to be dropped.
Thin as its evidence was, Duckett was now willing to state in a top-secret written report that Israel was a nuclear power. The revised estimate was more than a little bit sensitive, Duckett knew, and he cleared it first with Dick Helms. The CIA director told Duckett not to publish the estimate in any form and also declared that he himself would be the messenger with bad tidings. Helms walked the Duckett information into the Oval Office and gave it to the President. Johnson exploded, as Helms later recounted to Duckett, and demanded that the document be buried: “Don’t tell anyone else, even [Secretary of State] Dean Rusk and [Defense Secretary] Robert McNamara.” Helms did as he was told, but not without trepidation: “Helms knew that he would get in trouble with Rusk and McNamara if they learned that he had withheld it.”‡
Johnson’s purpose in chasing Helms—and his intelligence—away was clear: he did not want to know what the CIA was trying to tell him, for once he accepted that information, he would have to act on it. By 1968, the President had no intention of doing anything to stop the Israeli bomb, as Helms, Duckett, Walworth Barbour, William Dale, and a very few others in the U.S. government came to understand.
Moshe Dayan’s unilateral action to push Dimona into full-scale production carried what should have been a huge risk—a nuclear-armed Israel would find it impossible to sign the Nonproliferation Treaty, and Israel thus would not get its F-4s from the Johnson administration. The pressure from the Washington bureaucracy on that issue remained intense, especially at the Pentagon, where Clark Clifford, who had replaced Robert McNamara as secretary of defense at the end of January, and his senior aides were adamant. Clifford and his colleagues had no idea where their President really stood on the question of Israel and the NPT. In October 1968, one month before the presidential election, Johnson formally approved the F-4 sale in principle, but left the bargaining over delivery dates and other details to be negotiated. Paul C. Warnke, the assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, recalled thinking there still was “an outside chance” Israel could be forced to sign the NPT in exchange for immediate delivery. “It was worth doing,” he added, as a sign of a more even-handed approach to the Middle East.
Warnke called in Yitzhak Rabin, newly named as Israel’s ambassador to Washington, and began asking some tough questions about the bomb—direct questions that, obviously, had never before been posed to him by a high-level American official. “I was trying to find out what they had,” recalled Warnke, “and then stop it.” The discomfited Rabin asked Warnke for a definition of a nuclear weapon: “I said,” added Warnke, “ ‘It’s if you’ve got a delivery device in one room and the nuclear warhead in another room.’ ” The ambassador then asked: “Do you have a nuclear weapon unless you say you do?” A Warnke aide, Harry H. Schwartz, also was at the meeting and recalled an even tougher Warnke remark. “Mr. Ambassador,” Schwartz quoted Warnke as saying, “we are shocked at the manner in which you are dealing with us.… You, our close ally, are building nuclear bombs in Israel behind our back.” Rabin denied it, said Schwartz.
The ambassador, of course, was enraged by the encounter, which he subsequently claimed had nothing to do with nuclear weapons. In his memoirs, published in 1979, Rabin depicted the basic issue as Warnke’s insistence that the United States, as a condition of the F-4 sale, be permitted to have on-site supervision of every Israeli arms manufacturing plant and every defense installation engaged in research and development. “To say I was appalled would be a gross understatement,” Rabin wrote. “I sat there stupefied, feeling the blood rising to my face.” He left the meeting, he added, and began passing “broad hints” to Israel’s supporters in Congress and elsewhere to generate support for the F-4 sale.
Rabin did more than just pass hints. He and Major General Mordecai Hod, the Israeli Air Force’s chief of staff, went to see one of the few Americans who could get the President to change his mind—Abe Feinberg. “They were agitated,” Feinberg recalled. “Needed to see me right away. ‘Everything you’ve done about the Phantoms is going down the drain. Clifford is insisting on the NPT.’ ” Feinberg had met privately a few weeks earlier with Johnson and Walter Rostow and heard the President declare that there would be “no conditions” to the F-4 sale. “So I picked up the telephone,” he said, “called the White House, and asked for Rostow.” The national security adviser was having dinner at Clifford’s house, and Feinberg, who was well known to the White House switchboard operators, was patched through. “Walt gets on the telephone,” continued Feinberg, “and I say, ‘Walt, you and I and the President were together and Johnson said no conditions.’ Walt agrees. I say, ‘When you get back to the table, tell that to Clifford.’ ”
Clifford, who did not recount the incident in his 1991 memoir, Counsel to the President, telephoned the President and got the message. Paul Warnke arrived at a later meeting of his staff, all of whom favored tying the F-4 sale to Israeli acceptance of the NPT, and dramatically drew his hand across his neck. The NPT was out. Harry Schwartz recalled Warnke’s account of the Clifford-Johnson dialogue: “Clifford called Johnson and LBJ said, ‘Sell them anything they want.’
“ ‘Mr. President, I don’t want to live in a world where the Israelis have nuclear weapons.’
“ ‘Don’t bother me with this anymore.’ And he hangs up.” Johnson had given essentially that same message at the beginning of the year to Dick Helms’.
In his memoirs, President Johnson recounted with pride the formal White House ceremony in which the United States, the Soviet Union, and more than fifty other nations signed the NPT. The treaty, he wrote, was “the most difficult and most important … of all the agreements reached with Moscow” during his presidency. Why, then, did he make it possible for Israel to flout the NPT and keep its F-4s? Johnson’s decision had nothing to do with domestic politics or the heavy lobbying on the issue from Israel’s supporters in the Congress: his abrupt conversation with Clark Clifford took place after Nixon had won the 1968 Presidential elections. There’s also no evidence that Johnson felt he was in debt to the Israeli government for its support of his policies in Vietnam; American Jews, despite that support, were overwhelmingly hostile to the war. “A bunch of rabbis came here one day in 1967 to tell me that I ought not to send a single screwdriver to Vietnam,” the President complained to Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban in late 1968, “but on the other hand, [the U.S.] should push all our aircraft carriers through the Strait of Tiran to help Israel.”
There is no ready explanation for Johnson’s refusal to deal with the Israeli nuclear bomb. His decision not to stop the F-4 sale had given Israel, as Johnson had to know, a high-performance aircraft capable of carrying a nuclear weapon on a oneway mission to Moscow. It was, perhaps, nothing more than his farewell gift to the Israeli people and his way of repaying the loyalty of Abe Feinberg.
There is no question that Feinberg enjoyed the greatest presidential access and influence in his twenty years as a Jewish fund-raiser and lobbyist with Lyndon Johnson. Documents at the Johnson Library show that even the most senior members of the National Security Council understood that any issue raised by Feinberg had to be answered. In late October 1968, for example, Rostow was given a memorandum by a White House aide about Israeli press coverage of the “NPT-Phantom problem … just to give you a factual basis for your continued dealings with Feinberg.…” By 1968, the government of Israel had rewarded Feinberg for his services by permitting him to become the major owner of the nation’s Coca-Cola franchise. It would quickly become a multimillion-dollar profit center.§
Feinberg’s role as a fund-raiser was nonpareil in the Johnson White House: his cash was, on occasion, supplied directly to Walter W. Jenkins, the President’s most trusted personal aide, and his fellow political operatives in the White House—and not to the Democratic Party. There were others in the Jewish political establishment, men such as Arthur B. Krim, the New York attorney and president of United Artists, who raised large amounts of money specifically for the Democratic Party. Feinberg’s status was different, recalled Myer Feldman, Johnson’s aide for Jewish affairs: “Abe only raised cash—where it went only he knows.”
Feinberg acknowledged that he had a special cache: “A lot of people were afraid publicly to give as much as they could, so they arranged sub rosa cash payments. It had to be done laboriously—man-to-man. Raising money is a very humiliating process,” he added. “People you don’t respect piss all over you.” Feinberg’s special status became clear to some in the White House after the press revealed on October 14, 1964, that Walter Jenkins had been arrested a week earlier in the bathroom of a Washington YMCA on homosexual solicitation charges. The arrest took place three weeks before the 1964 presidential election. Johnson, in New York when word of the arrest—which he had attempted to suppress—became public, insisted that he and others in the White House distance themselves from the potentially scandalous incident. There was one immediate problem: at least $250,000 in cash that had been raised by Feinberg was in Jenkins’s safe and needed to be removed. Johnson telephoned Feldman and ordered him and Bill Moyers, another trusted aide and sometime speechwriter, to clean out Jenkins’s safe. Feldman was not surprised by the assignment: “Jenkins is the only person who knew everything that was going on. He took shorthand notes—reams of notes—ever since Johnson came into the Congress.” Feldman also knew that Jenkins was especially trusted on national security issues. What he and Moyers did not know was that they would find the Feinberg money. “Bill said, ‘What do we do with this?’ I said, ‘I don’t know. You handle it.’ ” The cash was in a briefcase.
Moyers, asked about the incident in early 1991, said his memory was vague, but acknowledged that “circumstances did lead me to believe” that Jenkins had a private cache of money in his safe. “I think there was a private fund. There was a lot of cash washed around in Washington in those days.” Asked specifically whether the cash was meant for the Democratic campaign, Moyers said, “I don’t know and I don’t know what happened to it. Anybody who smelled of money was always routed to Walter. He was the contact man for the contributors and he took his secrets to the grave with him.”
Moyers, now a prominent television personality, recalled the time in the Johnson White House when “a guy from North Carolina came to see me. He’d been routed from Walter—who wasn’t in—to me. He had a leather satchel and left it in my office. I ran out and told my secretary to find him.” The man was grabbed just as he was leaving the West Entrance, but refused to take back the briefcase. “He said,” Moyers recounted, “ ‘Oh no, I left it for Jenkins and Moyers.’ I told her to take it to Mildred [Walter Jenkins’s secretary].”
President Johnson, Moyers added, “was an equal opportunity taker. He’d take from friends and adversaries just because he thought that’s the way the system worked. No decisions were made on the basis of cash,” Moyers added, “but cash did give you access.” Asked about Feinberg, Moyers said, “I always thought Abe Feinberg had a lot of impact on Johnson; he had a big role to play.”
Harry Schwartz, Paul Warnke’s deputy, who died in early 1991, had a special reason to be frustrated by the Johnson administration’s inability to get Israel to sign the NPT. He had been stunned a year earlier when a group of Israeli military attachés had come into his Pentagon office and asked for a Low Altitude Bombing System (LABS) for nuclear weapons. The computerized bombing system provided time for an aircraft to drop its weapons and roll away to avoid the blast effects. “I just laughed at them,” recalled Schwartz. The Israelis cited the buildup of the Egyptian Army across the Sinai Canal and insisted that the LABS was needed only to “lob” high-explosive bombs onto the Egyptian emplacements. “I told them,” said Schwartz, “that any American who sells you a bombsight for that purpose is crazy, and I’m not crazy.”
There was a friendly private lunch early in the Nixon administration with Ambassador Rabin, well after Israel began receiving the F-4s. Schwartz decided to bring up the Israeli bomb, which Israel was still publicly insisting was only an option: “I think what you should do is what you’re doing now. Don’t ever haul one out, because your little government will disappear. The Soviets almost assuredly have your country targeted.”
“Mr. Schwartz,” calmly replied Rabin after a moment, “do you think we are crazy?”
* James Critchfield, a longtime CIA official who was chief of the Near East Division in 1967, recalled that Dayan and Zvi Zamir, then head of Mossad, joined forces with him and James Angleton at the end of the Six-Day War in a brief and ill-fated attempt to stop the abuse in the West Bank and elsewhere. The goal, said Critchfield, was to reach a quick accord on trading land for peace before the Israelis began settling the occupied territories. Dayan and Zamir were convinced that such a step would be “a disastrous development,” said Critchfield. “We had to reverse it immediately, or it’d be a fait accompli.” The goal was to start negotiations with Jordan’s King Hussein, who had entered the war reluctantly and late, and was eager to negotiate an end to Israeli attacks on his country and his palace. “We started talking and we were making progress,” said Critchfield. “I’d kept Mac Bundy [who had returned briefly to the White House as Johnson’s special national security assistant for the Middle East] informed and he’d approved it. Twelve days after the end of the war, I thought we ought to remind Mac that we were doing it.” A White House meeting was arranged with Bundy and Nicholas D. Katzenbach, then the under secretary of state. “We were told to knock it off,” Critchfield said. “They thought it was not well prepared. Angleton argued that if we do not act now with Dayan’s and Zamir’s support, there will be settlements in the West Bank. As we walked out, Mac said to me, ‘I’d forgotten how passionable Angleton could be. We were at Yale together.’ ” Katzenbach subsequently said he had no recollection of the meeting. Critchfield, who retired from the Agency in 1974, wasn’t surprised at the loss of memory: “They made a dumb act, and wanted to forget it.”
† Duckett acknowledged that his faith in Teller was shaken more than a little, however, a few years later when Teller arranged another meeting to confide that he was convinced that the Soviet Union would conduct a first strike with thermonuclear weapons across the United States on July 4, 1976—the two hundredth anniversary of American independence.
‡ Helms, despite his public image as a suave spymaster, was more of a bureaucrat than most newsmen and government officials in Washington could imagine. One of Helms’s senior deputies recalled the occasion in the last year of the Johnson administration when an angry President ordered a twenty-four-hour halt to all CIA intelligence collection and reporting on Vietnam. The President’s goal was to prevent a leak, and his assumption seemed to be that if he could stop the voluminous traffic to and from the CIA, he would do just that. Of course, shutting off the communications link had its obvious perils, and the senior CIA staff were sure that Helms would ignore, or override, the irrational presidential order. Not so. Although he most certainly knew better, Helms followed orders and stopped the traffic. “You don’t question what a President can do,” the CIA director told his dispirited aides.
§ Israel had rewarded other financial supporters with similarly lucrative business deals. In 1959, for example, Tricontinenal Pipelines, Ltd., an international investment group controlled by Baron Edmund de Rothschild, was given the concession to operate a sixteen-inch oil pipeline between Elat and Haifa, via Ashdod. The contract, signed by then Finance Minister Levi Eshkol on behalf of Israel, committed the state to ship at least 1.5 million tons of oil through the pipeline for the next fifteen years. Edmund de Rothschild was, according to Abe Feinberg, another major contributor to Dimona’s start-up costs.