Lakam

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ha-Lischka le-Kishrej Mada ( Hebrew הלשכה לקשרי מדע, German : Office for Scientific Connections ) or Lakam for short ( Hebrew לק״מ) was an Israeli intelligence service to protect and support the Israeli nuclear program . The agency founded in 1957 under the name “Office for Special Tasks” was closed in 1986.

founding

Mossad and Aman initially monitored the intelligence shielding of the top secret Israeli nuclear program . In the opinion of Prime Minister David Ben Gurion and his Chief Defense Advisor Shimon Peres , there was nevertheless a need to establish a new service that would be able to guarantee absolute security of nuclear information. The creation of the Lakam in 1957 by being separated from the structure of the Ministry of Defense was kept top secret. At first, even the highest chief of the Israeli intelligence services, Isser Harel, knew nothing of the existence of the Lakam. The agency's informants included academic attachés from the Israeli embassy in the United States and Europe, as well as Israeli scholars, who were pressured into patriotic use of information obtained abroad. Lakam supervised the construction of the nuclear reactor officially declared as a textile factory in the Negev . The first head of the Lakam was Benjamin Blumberg . It was initially called the Office for Special Tasks , only later was it renamed the Office for Scientific Connections .

Espionage of foreign services

Israel began to be interested in buying a French reactor during consultations with Britain and France in preparation for their intervention in the 1956 Suez Crisis . The endeavors were unsuccessful, but France was therefore suspicious of construction activities in the Negev. Agents of the French Intelligence Service ( SDECE ) tried to break into the construction area. The US intelligence services, especially the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency , which analyzed the data from the image reconnaissance of the construction area , also expressed concern . The US and France were skeptical about official statements by the Israeli government that denied the construction of nuclear weapons. France therefore cut its aid to the Israeli nuclear research program radically.

Uranium procurement

Despite observation by foreign services, Lakam was able to find a source for the raw material supply: the company Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (NUMEC) from the village of Apollo , Pennsylvania .

In 1965 the US Atomic Energy Commission discovered that the NUMEC, which fueled American nuclear reactors , had "lost" 91 kilograms of enriched uranium . The American intelligence service soon uncovered the company's relationship with the science attaché at the Israeli embassy in Washington, DC , who worked for Lakam. The NUMEC affair brought the United States to the realization that Israel was building nuclear weapons.

Operation Plumbat , together with the Mossad, secured the next amount of uranium : Towards the end of 1968 the freighter “Scheersberg A”, registered in the Federal Republic of Germany , set sail from Antwerp to Genoa with a cargo of 200 tons of uranium oxide , which was apparently bought for a German company had been. After a while, the ship found itself in the port of İskenderun with empty holds , the uranium oxide had been transferred to an Israeli ship on the open sea.

Change of leadership and expansion of tasks

When Benjamin Blumberg left in 1981, Rafi Eitan was his successor. Eitan was an advisor to Prime Minister Menachem Begin on matters relating to the fight against terrorism and had led the Mossad operation to the arrest of Adolf Eichmann . As head of the Lakam, he was subordinate to Defense Minister Ariel Sharon . This let Lakam expand in competition with the Mossad and operate worldwide. One of the objectives of the agency's operations was a. the US, thereby undermining agreements between the US and Israel.

Pollard affair and dissolution

Lakam's activities would probably have remained unknown if the name Eitans had not been mentioned in some of Jonathan Pollard's phone calls tapped by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in November 1985 . This US Navy Law Enforcement civilian analyst had offered spying services to an Israeli diplomat in New York City . The Mossad ignored this offer, but Lakam was interested. Eitan met with the Israeli science attaché he had appointed as Pollard's commanding officer and instructed him in particular about the materials in which Israel was interested. Thousands of documents of various kinds came into question, which Pollard carried out and copied and then brought back to the archives. After Pollard's arrest, the government of Israel officially declared that the whole operation had taken place without their knowledge. The American secret service suspected the Mossad from the start, but the latter, in turn, considered the Pollard report to be amateurism, which damaged the professional reputation of the Mossad. Shimon Peres, as Israeli prime minister, denied that he knew that a US citizen working for the service he founded was the source of the information that reached him. In an interview for the Israeli newspaper Chadashot , Eitan stated that all of the Lakam's activities, including Pollard's management, took place with the knowledge of their superiors. After the affair, Lakam was dissolved in 1986. In 1987, after a commission of inquiry came to the conclusion that it was in Israel's interest to take responsibility for what had happened, then Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu admitted in 1998 that Pollard had acted as a spy for Israel.

literature

  • Norman Polmar, Thomas B. Allen: Spy book. The encyclopedia of Espionage . London, Greenhill Books, 1997

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