Date

Aug 26, 1977

Description

Shackley and two other CIA staffers briefed Congressman Udall and his committee staffer, Dr. Henry Myers. The briefing apparently followed the same outline as the August 5 briefings of Senator Glenn and Congressman McCormack. There were interesting similarities and some differences in Udall and Myers' questions compared to earlier briefings. When asked whether FBI had interviewed Zalman Shapiro, Shackley said the "Agency has no knowledge of any direct debriefing of Mr. Shapiro by the FBI." Asked if President Johnson, "who was known to be a friend of Israel, could have encouraged the flow of nuclear materials to the Israelis," Shackley responded: "There is no information in the CIA files which are currently available to us which would indicate that President Johnson had ever undertaken any action which would have resulted in a diversion of nuclear materials to Israel." The CIA redacted nearly two pages of the answer to the question of how one would go about diverting material from NUMEC to Israel. In another answer, Shackley "stressed that CIA had never obtained any hard intelligence (half line redacted) which clearly linked NUMEC to the subsequent production of uranium-based nuclear weapons by Israel." Perhaps that redaction concerns the HEU that CIA found in the environment near Dimona, which Shackley described to the ERDA officials on July 29.

Source

CIA FOIA Reference No. F-2010-01210|1:15-cv-00224.

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

"Briefing of Representative Morris K. Udall, Democrat, Arizona, on the NUMEC Case," CIA Memorandum for the Record, Theodore G. Shackley, Associate Deputy Director for Operations, August 26, 1977, labeled SECRET SENSITIVE before redaction and release.