The Ghost by Jefferson Morley

Author:Jefferson Morley [Morley, Jefferson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2017-10-30T04:00:00+00:00

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“I REMEMBERED A LONG drive out into the desert in his Ford Falcon,” wrote John Hadden, Jr., in a memoir about growing up in a CIA family. Hadden was twelve years old when his father, John Hadden, Sr., served as CIA station chief in Israel in the mid-1960s.

“We stopped in the middle of nowhere,” the son wrote. “Pop got us all out of the car and passed out peanut butter sandwiches wrapped by my mother in wax paper. He dove into the trunk and withdrew a small pruning shears. I’d never seen him handle a garden tool. He darted about quickly, clipping bits of shrubbery, keeping a lookout on the horizon. There was a fantastic dome a mile or two in the distance beyond some barbed wire. It was the nuclear reactor at Dimona.”159

Angleton had selected Hadden for the job as station chief, and the two men got along personally, but they had very different conceptions of their mission.

“I thought we ought to learn things about the Israelis, like whether or not they had a bomb,” said Hadden. “He didn’t think so.”160

John Hadden’s espionage picnic produced one critical clue: the isotopic signature of the radioactive deposits on the plants he collected near the Dimona site. The plant samples indicated a radiation source of 97.7 percent enriched uranium.161 For CIA scientists, that was notable. Almost all the nuclear reactors in the world used 93 percent enriched uranium. The more highly enriched uranium, which generates nuclear power more efficiently, was reserved for special purposes, such as powering U.S. nuclear submarines. Subsequent samples from around Dimona confirmed Hadden’s finding.162 The Israelis had obtained their nuclear fuel from an unusual source. But where?

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