were dismissed for their part in approving the sale of the missile
boats to the fictitious Starboat Line. Seven days after leaving Cher-
bourg, the missile boats anchored in Haifa port.NOKMIM.See AVENGERS.NORTH THEATER/ZIRA TSEFONIT(ZITSAP).The desk in Mil-
itary Intelligenceresponsible for Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq. Before
the 1973 Yom Kippur War, this desk was designated Branch 5.NUCLEAR MATERIALS AND EQUIPMENT CORPORATION
(NUMEC).NUMEC was formed in 1957 by an American Jew, Dr.
Zalman M. Shapiro, for the manufacture of nuclear fuels and spe-
cialty metals. The company operated from a facility near Apollo,
Pennsylvania. From the early 1960s through 1970, NUMEC disposed
of radioactive and nonradioactive waste generated from the company
facility in accordance with the U.S. regulations at that time. Shapiro,
who served as NUMEC’s president, was a staunch supporter of Is-
rael. He was in a position to bid for government contracts to process
uranium and to produce fuels for reactors and for the U.S. space pro-
gram. He even won contracts to work with Admiral Hyman Rickover,
father of the U.S. nuclear submarine fleet.
In the early 1960s the Bureau of Scientific Liaison(LAKAM) de-
cided to use NUMEC to obtain uranium for the Israeli nuclear
weapons program. For this purpose, a dummy company, Isotopes
and Radiation Enterprises (ISORAD), was formed in the United
States. ISORAD was owned half by NUMEC and half by the Israeli
government. Officially the company was engaged in developing
techniques to preserve fruit through irradiation; in reality, it served as
the pipeline for obtaining uranium from NUMEC for the Israeli nu-
clear weapons program. LAKAM even succeeded in slipping the Is-
raeli metallurgist Baruch (Bernard) Sinai into NUMEC as a consult-
ant. Ephraim Lahav and Avraham Hermoni, officially the Israeli
scientific attachés at the embassy in Washington, D.C., but in fact
LAKAM representatives in the United States, were frequent visitors
at the NUMEC plant.
In the 1960s Shapiro succeeded in diverting large quantities of
weapons-grade uranium to Israel. In those years the unaccounted-forNUCLEAR MATERIALS AND EQUIPMENT CORPORATION• 21506-102 (03) H-P.qxd 3/24/06 7:25 AM Page 215