In his new book, The Samson Option, Hersh brings the same investigative skills, eye for intrigue, and meticulous footnoting to the story of Israel's emergence as a nuclear power.
The book has already gained a measure of notoriety as a result of the sudden and mysterious death of Robert Maxwell, the British newspaper magnate, while cruising in his luxurious yacht off the Canary Islands.
At the time of his death, Maxwell was suing Hersh over suggestions in the book that Maxwell was acting as an agent, official or otherwise, of the Israeli government or its intelligence service in 1986 when he ordered his London Sunday Mirror to discredit an expose of Israel's nuclear program that was about to be published in a rival paper, the Sunday Times.
The disinformation campaign that Maxwell orchestrated was effective. Other news organizations ignored the Sunday Times exclusive. A few days before publication, the paper's informant, an Israeli defector named Mordecai Vanunu, was lured out of Britain by a female agent of the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency. She took him to Rome where he was drugged, transported by ship to Israel, put on trial and sentenced to 18 years in jail.
The Maxwell affair is just one small episode in a fascinating, and well balanced, study of scientific determination, duplicity and international intrigue.
For 40 years, Israeli leaders lied to the world about their country's determination to build nuclear weapons. They lied to their own people about the scientific and financial resources ($ 500 million a year by the mid-1960s) they were pouring into their nuclear processing facilities at Dimona in the Negev desert.
For 40 years, Washington, knowing full well what Israel was up to, deliberately looked the other way - piously preaching non-proliferation to the rest of the world while studiously ignoring even a joint Israel-South Africa nuclear test in the Indian Ocean in 1979. President Dwight Eisenhower displayed an old general's delight in the photos taken by U-2 spy planes of the construction work that thousands of French engineers and North African workers were doing in the Israeli desert. But he would not authorize anything more than passive reconnaissance.
President John Kennedy got so irritated by Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion's bland assurances that Israel had no intention of becoming an atomic power that he privately described the Israelis as "sons of bitches (who) lie to me constantly about their nuclear capability." But although relations with Ben-Gurion soured, Kennedy could never bring himself to expose the Israeli secret.
President Lyndon Johnson was urged not to sell Israel F-4 jet aircraft capable of delivering nuclear warheads, unless the Israelis would agree to international inspection to verify their claim that their nuclear installations were for peaceful purposes only. But Johnson grew so tired of being told by the CIA and the State Department about Israel's bomb-building that he finally exploded, "Don't bother me with this any more."
No president wanted to antagonize the Jewish vote in the U.S. Equally important, every president could rationalize allowing Israel to develop nuclear arms as a way of offsetting the growing Soviet influence in the Middle East.
The Samson Option works on three levels. There's the engrossing story of the clandestine program that produced the varied nuclear arsenal that Israel has today. There's the saga of U.S. intelligence efforts to expose Israeli nuclear activity. And there's the political tale of hypocrisy in high places as the White House persevered in seeing no evil.
"What is unusual is that one of America's most important allies - a beleaguered ally surrounded by avowed enemies constantly threatening war - has secretly amassed a large nuclear arsenal while Washington looked the other way," Hersh writes.
"America's policy toward the Israeli arsenal ... was a conscious policy of ignoring reality."
This is an excellent piece of investigative reporting that sheds new light on how Israel's development of nuclear weapons changed the balance of power in the Middle East- a balance that is still being determined today. But Hersh has no answers; he does not pretend to be offering a definitive overview of geopolitics in that troubled region. The book's value lies simply in its exposure of how the American system conspires to protect America's friends.
*Geoffrey Stevens is a Toronto writer and editor.
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