US Nuclear Weapons Unaccountable

Israel Behind The Crime

Israel’s nuclear smuggling network was key element in Carnaby murder in Houston

By Wayne Madsen

Israel, working with deeply-embedded intelligence moles in the United States, including within the U.S. government and “off-the-books” intelligence front companies, has been pilfering spent U.S. nuclear fuel from American nuclear arms caches at a phenomenal rate over the last several years. U.S. and foreign intelligence sources have confirmed that much of the nuclear fuel has been shipped to Israel and other locations via the port of Houston.

The illegal smuggling of spent highly-enriched uranium (HEU) and plutonium fuel from U.S. nuclear weapons facilities is the same outbound Houston shipping pipeline used by Bush-influenced Carlyle Group and the firm’s front companies in Spain and France to ship precursor nerve gas chemicals to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in the 1980s, according to one Pentagon intelligence source.

The nuclear smuggling is a major back story to a September 8 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report titled “Nuclear Nonproliferation: U.S. Agencies Have Limited Ability to Account for, Monitor, and Evaluate the Security of U.S. Nuclear Material Overseas.” The most serious finding in the GAO report states:

“DOE [Department of Energy], NRC [Nuclear Regulatory Commission], and State are not able to fully account for U.S. nuclear material overseas that is subject to nuclear cooperation agreement terms because the agreements do not stipulate systematic reporting of such information, and there is no U.S. policy to pursue or obtain such information. U.S. nuclear cooperation agreements generally require that partners report inventory information upon request, however, DOE and NRC have not systematically sought such data. DOE and NRC do not have a comprehensive, detailed, current inventory of U.S. nuclear material–including weapon-usable material such as highly enriched uranium (HEU) and separated plutonium–overseas that includes the country, facility, and quantity of material.

In addition, NRC and DOE could not fully account for the current location and disposition of U.S. HEU overseas in response to a 1992 congressional mandate. U.S. agencies, in a 1993 report produced in response to the mandate, were able to verify the location of 1,160 kilograms out of 17,500 kilograms of U.S. HEU estimated to have been exported. DOE, NRC, and State have established annual inventory reconciliations with five U.S. partners, but not the others it has transferred material to or trades with.”

The report also states that a nuclear cooperation agreement between the United States and Israel was allowed to lapse. The GAO report also states: “DOE’s Global Threat Reduction Initiative (GTRI) removes U.S. nuclear material from vulnerable facilities overseas but can only bring back materials that have an approved disposition pathway and meet the program’s eligibility criteria.” WMR has been informed that because of the amount of HEU and plutonium smuggled from the United States outside of “approved disposition pathways,” there is no way for the United States to know exactly where HEU and plutonium has been distributed, especially to unauthorized end-users who have been using the spent nuclear material in violation of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT) or U.S. export control laws. Countries that fall into this category, according to our sources, include Japan, Israel, South Korea, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, India, Syria, Iran, Burma, Egypt, Turkey, Taiwan, and Pakistan.

The major reason behind the nuclear material smuggling from the United States stems from Israel quietly re-establishing its global nuclear smuggling operations, rampant during the 1960s when it was working to acquire nuclear weapons. Israel’s Dimona nuclear reactor capabilities have always been clouded in maximum secrecy but it is known that the facility suffered a major equipment failure in the 1990s that impacted on Israel’s ability to re-process nuclear fuel. The diminished capabilities of the Negev Nuclear Research Center prompted Israel, in the 1990s, to actively smuggle nuclear materials, including enriched plutonium, to Israel.

The smuggling operations immediately became known to the CIA’s Counterproliferation Division and its non-official cover (NOC) Brewster Jennings & Associates operation headed up by Valerie Plame Wilson’s. It was a major reason why Vice President Dick Cheney, his counsel Scooter Libby, State Department Undersecretary for Political Affairs (and President Obama’s current envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan) Marc Grossman, and others within the Bush administration exposed the Brewster Jennings operations.

Israel’s search for replacement enriched plutonium hit pay-dirt when its intelligence service discovered that the Pantex nuclear facility near Amarillo, Texas, stores enriched plutonium fuel that is 99 percent pure plutonium that does not require reprocessing for another 60 to 90 years.Israel gained access to the classified details of the Pantex operation by tapping intoclassified government communication networks through the Israeli-owned communication company AMDOCS.

The Israelis discovered that only U.S. nuclear cores composed of plutonium alloys were ripe for theft at Pantex. The 99 percent plutonium fuel was more well-guarded. However, the older plutonium alloy cores were unstable and the shipment of the cores through the port of Houston required refrigerated containers to keep them cooler than 150 degrees.The Israelis used refrigeration trucks to move the cores through the port of Houston from Amarillo and into refrigeration containers loaded on board ships belonging to Zim-American Israeli Shipping Company, a firm with close links to the Mossad. The plutonium cores were shipped to Israel and Dimona.

One individual who had the port of Houston under close scrutiny was CIA contractor/informant/source Roland “Tony” Carnaby. Carnaby had set up a number of videosurveillance cameras at the port of Houston and routinely uploaded the stored videos from the camera units to his Macintosh computer. WMR has learned from intelligence sources that Carnaby possessed a major secret about the smuggling operation: much of the nuclear material being shipped through Houston by Israel, more than its needs, was being re-sold by Israel on the international black market. On April 29, 2008, Carnaby was shot to death by two Houston police officers after what was reported to have been a high-speed chase by police.

After he was killed, the Houston police took possession of Carnaby’s Macintosh computer. WMR previously reported that Carnaby kept Israeli intelligence assets and agents under close scrutiny in Houston and that he had a strange encounter with an Israeli Consulate General official the evening before he was shot. WMR also previously reported on Mossad’s penetration of the Houston Police Department and the Harris County Sheriff’s Office. Radiation detectors routinely scan containers at Houston for the presence of nuclear materials, hence, it was important for the Mossad to counteract Carnaby’s security systems at the port.

It is known that Carnaby used a number of cell phones to dial into port video cameras to turn them on, stop them, and download captured video data. However, an Israeli firm, Orsus, was scheduled to begin installation of its own surveillance at the port, putting Carnaby’s surveillance operations in jeopardy. The financial backers of Orsus include ComSor Venture Fund LDC, a joint operation of Comverse Technology, which includes its subsidiary Verint Systems, and Soros Fund Management’s Quantum Industrial Holdings Ltd.

Other investors in Orsus include Israel’s Koor Industries, the leading shareholder of Tadiran, the Israeli defense electronics firm; Cial Industries and Investment, an Israeli holding company; the Cedar Fund, an ‘Israeli-related’venture capital firm; Israel Infinity Venture Capital Fund; and Poalim Capital Markets, a subsidiary of Bank Hapoalim, Israel’s largest bank.”

Carnaby was, reportedly, working with the FBI on the Israeli nuclear smuggling issue and the FBI office in Houston requested that the Houston police call off their chase of Carnaby. It was too late for Carnaby. He was marked for assassination by Mossad and its friends in Houston area law enforcement because of his knowledge of the nuclear smuggling program. Israel was also concerned that Carnaby, a Lebanese-American with close ties to some of Lebanon’s political groups opposed to Israel, might leak details of the operations to his Lebanese friends, information that would soon end up in the hands of Iranian and Syrian counter-intelligence.

One of the countries that received re-sold American plutonium fuel from Israel was Japan. However, the Japanese soon discovered that the plutonium for which they were paying the Israelis top dollar was too old and provided only short-life usable nuclear weapons. Japan decided to go it alone on their nuclear weapons development but not before they planned to blow the whistle on the Israeli and American smuggling operation to the International Atonic Energy Agency (IAEA). Before the Japanese could act, the super-quake struck Japan, along with the devastating tsunami. At that point in time, Israel and the Americans programmed their Stuxnet computer virus to trigger the nuclear catastrophe at Fukushima, the major site for Japan’s nuclear weapons development program.

Stuxnet, developed to disrupt Iran’s nuclear program, is also effective against the nuclear power generation systems of other nations using standard supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) software, including the plutonium MOX fuel processing operations at Fukushima. Stuxnet can be used to blackmail recipients of the smuggled plutonium material, including MOX fuel, into silence. The Fukushima disaster destroyed physical evidence of the Israeli smuggling operation to Japan. However, Japanese intelligence possesses other evidence of the Israeli smuggling operations.

The recent explosion at a MOX fuel plutonium processing facility at the French Marcoule nuclear power plant was a warning to France, courtesy of Stuxnet, not to support Palestine’s bid for UN membership. It is not yet clear whether the MOX being used at Marcoule was developed from the unstable and old American plutonium cores smuggled and re-sold by Israel. However, U.S. intelligence has evidence that Israel has re-sold some of its stolen plutonium material to India in return for that nation providing Israel with missile systems and related technology.

The disassociation of the CIA and FBI from Carnaby’s murder in Houston was directly linked to the power of the Israel Lobby in Washington, which will stop at nothing to ensure that Israeli crimes and intelligence activities in the United States remain unexposed and unpunished.