'''FBI and CIA’s ‘Duty To Warn’ Victims of Israeli Nuclear Smuggling
Dec 27 2018'''
Last fall the US Army Corps of Engineers announced it was finally ready to resume a $500 million toxic waste cleanup of the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (NUMEC) dump. An earlier attempt at the Pennsylvania site to excavate was stopped after the discovery of unexpected materials. NUMEC’s plant sites in Apollo and Parks Township have long been the subject of litigation over wrongful mass deaths and illnesses caused by toxic pollution.
NUMEC was launched and managed by Zalman Shapiro, a nuclear chemist credited with solving engineering issues for naval nuclear propulsion in the 1950s. His partner, David Luzer Lowenthal was a smuggler with murky ties to Israeli intelligence and industrialist. Luzer organized the emergence of NUMEC from a complicated merger and acquired facilities for NUMEC in a defunct steel mill in the middle of Apollo, Pennsylvania. The Zionist Organization of America, originally chartered to "do any and all things that may be necessary" to support Israel, supplied three of NUMEC’s executives. Zalman Shapiro, Pittsburgh region president of ZOA, Morton Chatkin and Ivan J. Novick who became ZOA’s national president.
Officially NUMEC was a startup supplier of highly-enriched fuel for the US Navy. But two Central Intelligence Agency officials claimed NUMEC’s true purpose was to amass and divert US government-owned highly enriched uranium into Israel’s nuclear weapons program. 300 kilograms of highly enriched uranium disappeared from NUMEC between 1957-1978, with most of it gone by 1966. Material stolen from NUMEC would have been the most likely source for Israel’s ability to ready nuclear weapons for use during the 1967 Six-Day War.
A February 2015 lawsuit seeking all of the CIA’s "thousands" of files about NUMEC was ended when the presiding judge refused to allow adding the US Department of Justice – which has worn many hats in the NUMEC affair – as an additional defendant. However some CIA documents were released during the court battle, revealing how the CIA had refused to cooperate with two separate FBI investigations of NUMEC, preferring to cover up damning information obtained from clandestine CIA operations in Israel confirming the diversion.
https://original.antiwar.com/smith-grant/2018/12/26/fbi-and-cias-duty-to-warn-victims-of-israeli-nuclear-smuggling/
May 5, 1969 FBI wiretap summary of Zalman Shapiro discussing a toxic spill at NUMEC(PDF): http://www.israellobby.org/numec/08292011lowenthal.pdf
NUMEC Document Archive @ the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy
http://www.israellobby.org/numec/default.asp
Complementary Sauce
CBS re: Army Corp of Engineers Set to Remove Nuclear Waste from Parks Twp Site
https://pittsburgh.cbslocal.com/2018/10/08/parks-township-nuclear-waste-removal/
Israel Nuclear Weapons 101: https://nationalinterest.org/feature/welcome-israeli-nuclear-weapons-101-13882
Israel's "Samson Option": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samson_Option
https://archive.org/details/Sampson_Option
> Seymour Hersh's book on the Samson Option linked above alleges Israel's Nuclear Weapons Program was secretly started in the late 1960s in the Negev Desert. NUMEC Docs strongly imply the missing Uranium ended up in Israeli hands by 1966.
> The Army Corp of Engineers found "unexpected materials" at the NUMEC site.
> From the Shapiro wiretap:
"It’s not only a bad spill but ‘actually they are operating outside compliance.’ They have about 200 drums and estimate that about six a day will corrode through. The trouble lay with a fluoride which was put in to help the decay, and this was not checked."
THEN CHECK THIS OUT
(from op article)
neither the CIA nor the FBI have met their current obligations under "duty to warn" to officially alert the victims of NUMEC and contractors precisely what dangers they are still facing as the cleanup recommences.
Such overdue disclosures could also allow NUMEC’s victims to pursue claims against the perpetrator and beneficiary of the fraud and pollution – the Israeli government.
> PRECEDENT