Israeli nuclear piracy
Below is an article on Israeli nuclear piracy which first appeared in the August 1977 issue of the journal Instauration.
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For years Western leaders have been warning us about the danger of terrorist groups stealing large quantities of the stuff that atomic bombs are made of. Now it turns out that the same leaders have been sitting on just such a story for almost a decade. The first nuclear heist has already taken place, and everybody knew about it but the people.
In September 1968 in Rotterdam. Holland, a certain Burhan M. Yarisal, an alleged Turk living in Italy, bought from the Biscayne Traders Shipping Corp. of Monrovia, liberia, the 2,150-ton vessel Scheersberg for 1.15 million marks. Thereupon a new captain, a Britisher named Barrow, came abroard and set sail for Antwerp, where 200 metric tons of uranium oxide were loaded aboard in 560 containers--enough uranium to make thirty atom bombs of the Hiroshima variety. Since the cargo was originally destined for Morocco, which does not belong to the European Common Market, special permission had to be secured from Euratom, the European Atomic Energy Commission. When Euratom disapproved, it was arranged for a firm in Milan, Italy, to be the consignee.
On November 17 the Scheersberg, rebaptized the Scheersberg A, left Antwerp for Genoa, Italy, where it never arrived. Somewhere in the blue Mediterranean Captain Barrow received a radio communication ordering him to change course. On December 2, the Scheersberg A, after having been sighted in both the Black Sea and the Atlantic, dropped anchor in the Turkish port of Iskenderun. The ship was now riding higher in the water because the uranium was no longer in the hold.
Euratom officials later asked the Milan company if it had received the uranium and received a negative answer. An alarm was then issued. The secret services of Belgium and Italy went to work. But when West Germany's foreign news service BND heard the information, it kept mum.
After the Scheersberg A reached Iskenderun its owner sold it to a Greek company which changed the ship's name to Haroula, and conveniently went out of business. Then the new owner sold the ship to a firm in Cyprus which quickly renamed it the Kerkyra. When Euratom authorities finally caught up with the freighter, the log book pages for the dates the ship was carrying the uranium were missing. In the engineer's logbook the relevant pages were so smeared with oil they were illegible.
Five years after the disappearance of the uranium an Israeli agent arrested in Norway for the murder of an Arab waiter confessed he had been a member of the Israeli boarding party which had seized the Scheersberg A and taken the ship and her cargo to Israel. The Norwegian authorities did not make this news public. The affair then sank out of sight for another four years until the media uncloseted the story just before the opening of last spring's London summit conference. Some said the White House leaked it in order to put some muscle in President Carter's demand for stricter international control of nuclear materials.
As customary in the rare cases when an unfavorable story about Israel surfaces, there was no week-long wringing of editorial hands, little press or TV followup, no searching interviews with sundry pundits. History's first act of atomic piracy, having been kept secret for nine years, didn't seem to be newsworthy to the media, which would have talked about nothing else for weeks if the pirates had been South Africans, Arabs or Chileans.
There is still a lot more to this story than has met the public eye. What happened to the crew and the captain? Were they simply liquidated and thrown overboard? Time magazine, in a belated report, said a Spanish crew was replaced by an Israeli crew at Antwerp, contradicting the more detailed report in a German paper which said the original crew was German. Time also wrote that the whole affair was a deal between West Germany and Israel to pemit the latter to acquire uranium secretly so as not to stir up Russia into giving nuclear weapons to the Arabs.
If the Time story is only half-true, then the affair is far more serious than piracy. If West Germany in 1968, when the Christian Democratic party was in power, made a secret deal involving the shipment of uranium, we may be certain that approval had to be obtained from the U.S. At that time West Germany would not have touched a nuclear transaction of any kind with a 10,000 foot pole without a clear go-ahead signal from Washington.
If it was piracy, the U.S. deliberately helped to keep the crime secret for nine years, all the while emitting pious announcements about the danger of the theft of nuclear material by terrorists. But if it was a secret arrangement, as Time claims, then the U.S. knowingly participated in the illegal delivery of nuclear materials to a foreign nation, thereby not only breaking domestic and European laws and contravening its own announced policy of opposition to nuclear proliferation, but directly endangering the lives of tens of millions of Near Easterners in the next edition of the Arab-Israeli war. Even more monstrous is the fact that the shipment of nuclear materials to a combatant in an area as unstable as the Near East greatly increases the chance of a nuclear confrontation between Russia and the U.S.