UK helped Israel get nuclear bomb. Was there an Israeli spy in MI5?

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http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4743987.stm

British civil servants secretly sold Israel a key ingredient for its nuclear programme in 1958, according to official documents obtained by BBC News.

UK government ministers were unaware of the deal. The documents suggest that only civil servants were involved.

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In 1961 high-ranking KGB officer Anatoli Golitsin defected to the West. Golitsin confirmed there were foreign agents within the British secret service, although Golitsin knew them only by their code names.In 1968 Golitsin travelled to Britain and was shown documents which contained the code names of unidentified agents.Two code names- David and Rosa - particularly interested Golitsin. Golitsin studied the files of MI5 officers, picked out two, and then declared to MI5 Officer Peter Wright: "Your spies are here."The files bore the names of Victor and Tess Rothschild.

Rothschild had joined MI5 during World War Two. Rothschild had access to most secrets and most of the top people in the Secret service.

In the book 'The Fifth Man', (by Roland Perry, Pan Books London 1994) Roland Perry puts the case that Ted Rothschild was a major spy who helped Israel.

According to ex-KGB Colonel 'F' and KGB officer Yuri Modin, Rothschild was the key to much of the penetration of British Intelligence.

Soon after Israel was formed, Rothschild was allegedly involved with Chaim Weizmann in setting up a special nuclear physics department in a scientific institute in Rehovoth.

Edward Heath in 1970 made Rothschild the head of the government's Central Policy Review Staff. Later Margaret Thatcher appointed Rothschild as her unofficial security adviser.

In 1972, Rothschild reportedly played a major part in choosing the new head of MI5, Michael Hanley


http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4743987.stm
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/foreignaffairs/story/0,11538,1542078,00.html

In 1958 Britain secretly sold Israel a key ingredient for its nuclear programme, heavy water, according to official documents obtained by BBC News.

The Whitehall documents were discovered at the Public Records Office, the British National Archives.

The sale, in two successive 10-ton shipments to Israel from a British port, went to Israel's secret underground reactor at Dimona in the Negev desert.

The heavy water was vital for plutonium production at the top-secret Dimona nuclear reactor in Israel's Negev desert.

No "peaceful use only" condition was placed on its use.

Ministers in Harold Macmillan's government were unaware of the deal. It was also kept secret from the US. The documents appear to suggest that only civil servants at a relatively low level were involved.

In one of the documents Foreign Office official Donald Cape concluded: "On the whole I would prefer not to mention this to the Americans."

US President John F Kennedy's defence secretary from 1961, Robert McNamara, told BBC News he was "astonished" by the cover-up.

"It is very surprising to me we were not told because we shared information about the nuclear bomb very closely with the British.

"The fact Israel was trying to develop a nuclear bomb should not have come as any surprise.

"But that Britain should have supplied it with heavy water was indeed a surprise to me."

Officials presented it as a deal between Norway and Israel.

Former Conservative defence and foreign office minister Lord Gilmour told BBC News the revelations were "quite extraordinary".

The civil servants involved must have known Israel would use the heavy water to develop a nuclear bomb, he added.

"They just seemed to be concerned with making a bit of money."

By the time Israel asked the UK for more heavy water in 1961, the existence of the Dimona reactor and a probable nuclear weapons programme had been exposed by the Daily Express newspaper, leading the Foreign Office to block the sale, the papers show.

Sir Hugh Stephenson wrote: "I am quite sure we should not agree to this sale.

"The Israeli project is much too live an issue for us to get mixed up in it again."





MI5 and MI6



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