Date

Apr 27, 1979

Description

This April 27, 1979, document contains summaries of interviews conducted by the Inspector General’s office of DOE. The interviews concerned a briefing that Theodore Shackley provided on July 29, 1977, to ERDA’s acting administrator, Robert Fri, who was accompanied by generals Edward Giller and Alfred Starbird. The inspector general was investigating whether these men had lied to Congressman John Dingell’s committee when they testified on August 8, 1977. Although DOE, ERDA's successor agency, redacted much of Giller, Starbird and Fri's recollections of the briefing, Giller’s comments do mention some things not addressed in redacted summaries of other briefings Shackley conducted in summer 1977. For example, Giller "emphasized his belief that, even with careful analysis, the possibility of poor information, stemming from HUMINT [human intelligence] sources, still remains." He went on to say, apparently in reference to something Shackley had said about the discovery of HEU in Israel, "the U.S. government has made authorized shipments of high-enriched SNM to Israel in the past, which were intended for the Israeli reactor program." Such shipments involved the Nahal Soreq research reactor which used 93 percent HEU fuel, not the 97.7 percent HEU found by CIA in the environment near Dimona, 100 kilometers away from Nahal Soreq.

A January 28, 1979 article in the Washington Star newspaper reported what Shackley told the three ERDA representatives on July 29, 1977.[12] The article predates the DOE report of April 27, 1979, suggesting that the sources for the article were internal to the DOE. “According to government sources, a retired Air Force General, Alfred Starbird, recently told investigators that a CIA official told him that the CIA had obtained a sample of highly enriched uranium from Israel and that it bore the chemical ‘signature’ of material that had originated at the U.S. uranium enrichment plant at Portsmouth, Ohio. If the information is true, this would amount to scientific proof of the first known diversion of the nation’s most heavily guarded nuclear material by persons acting as foreign agents.”

Source

Sources: Cover letter released per DOE FOIA File No. 2007-000554 and attachments available at University of Arizona, Special Collections Library, Papers of Morris Udall, MS 325, Box 365 Folder 1.

Document published in following posting(s):

The NUMEC Affair: Did Highly Enriched Uranium from the U.S. Aid Israel's Nuclear Weapons Program?

Nov 2, 2016

CIA briefing of ERDA officials on July 29, 1977, as recorded in DOE internal memorandum of April 27, 1979, from DOE Deputy Inspector General to Under Secretary with attachments entitled “August 8, 1977 NUMEC-Related Congressional Hearing,” labeled SECRET before redaction and release.