Stolen Weapons Grade Uranium: Remembering The Apollo Affair

In May 2026, Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-TX) led a group of 30 House Democrats in sending a formal letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio demanding the United States end its decades-long policy of nuclear ambiguity regarding Israel. Castro explicitly cited the ongoing U.S. and Israel military conflict with Iran, noting that “fighting this war side by side with a country whose potential nuclear weapons program the United States government officially refuses to acknowledge risks miscalculation” and potential nuclear escalation. The signatories cited the classified 1974 Special National Intelligence Estimate confirming Israel had nuclear weapons and asked eleven specific questions, including whether Israel had communicated nuclear red lines to U.S. officials.

Castro’s letter represents the most significant congressional challenge to American silence on Israel’s nuclear program in decades. Yet buried beneath that silence lies a scandal that stretches back to the early Cold War—one involving a small Pennsylvania town, a team of Israeli spies, and the largest loss of weapons-grade uranium in American history.

The trail begins in the small borough of Apollo, Pennsylvania, roughly 30 miles northeast of Pittsburgh, where the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (NUMEC) processed approximately 17 metric tons of weapons-grade highly enriched uranium (HEU) for the United States government between 1957 and 1978. By the time investigators finished their work, more than 337 kilograms of that material had vanished—enough fissile material to construct multiple nuclear weapons. The CIA concluded that the missing uranium ended up in Israel’s nuclear arsenal. Yet no one was ever prosecuted, and the story has been systematically suppressed for over half a century.

In 1957, chemist Zalman Mordecai Shapiro co-founded NUMEC to process government-owned enriched uranium into naval reactor fuel and commercial nuclear fuel. Shapiro was a respected scientist who had assisted in the design of the world’s first nuclear-powered submarine, the USS Nautilus. He was also a committed Zionist with extensive contacts in the Israeli government, including a separate contract to build nuclear-powered generators for Israel.

In 1965, after the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) ordered a physical inventory of the plant, investigators discovered that approximately 93 kilograms—about 205 pounds—of highly enriched uranium could not be accounted for. By the time NUMEC was fully decommissioned in 1978, the total cumulative “material unaccounted for” had grown to 337 kilograms—roughly 741 pounds—confirmed by the Energy Department in a 2001 historical report as the largest HEU inventory loss at any commercial site in U.S. history. Shapiro and his co-founders claimed the losses were normal industrial attrition. The AEC’s own materials accountability system at the time was remarkably lax, providing no mechanism for physically checking shipments abroad, requiring no security clearances for employees handling nuclear materials, and mandating no physical protection of special nuclear material either inside or in transit from private plants.

The men at the center of this affair were not ordinary businessmen. Beyond running NUMEC, Shapiro was a member of the Zionist Organization of America’s Pittsburgh chapter, traveled frequently to Israel, had NUMEC serve as a procurement and sales agent for the Israeli Ministry of Defense, and was involved in a joint venture called ISORAD with Israel’s nuclear organization. FBI surveillance revealed unusual meetings between Shapiro and known Israeli intelligence operatives that were never satisfactorily explained.

Rafael “Rafi” Eitan is the most explosive figure in the affair. On September 10, 1968, four Israeli nationals arrived at the NUMEC plant. They listed their purpose as discussing the purchase of small plutonium-238 power sources, identifying themselves as a “chemist” and “electronics specialists.” In reality, Eitan was not a chemist. He was one of Israel’s most accomplished intelligence operatives, famous for serving as the operational ground commander of the 1960 Mossad team that seized Nazi veteran Adolf Eichmann in Buenos Aires. He later became head of LAKAM, Israel’s scientific intelligence service, and in the 1980s he directed the operation that recruited Jonathan Pollard to spy against the United States.

The other three visitors in the 1968 delegation were equally remarkable. Avraham Bendor—whose real name was Avraham Shalom—was a long-time Shin Bet agent who served as deputy commander of the Eichmann capture in 1960 and later became head of the Israeli internal security service (Shin Bet) from 1980 to 1986. Avraham Hermoni was listed as the Israeli Embassy’s scientific counselor but was in fact the technical director of Israel’s nuclear bomb project at RAFAEL, Israel’s armament development authority, with a direct role in the Dimona project. That this group of four—collectively representing the operational cream of Israeli intelligence and nuclear weapons development—would visit a Pennsylvania fuel processing plant to discuss commercial plutonium power sources strained any plausible cover story. As former Pentagon official Anthony Cordesman put it: “There is no conceivable reason for Eitan to have gone to the Apollo plant but for the nuclear material.” David Lowenthal, NUMEC’s venture capitalist and financier, also had close ties to Israeli intelligence and had previously facilitated the transport of refugees between the U.S., Europe, and Israel before organizing NUMEC’s financing.

Several independent threads of evidence coalesced to make the diversion case compelling. Before April 1968, the CIA had conducted clandestine environmental sampling around Israel’s Dimona nuclear complex and detected traces of highly enriched uranium there. Critically, the uranium bore the isotopic signature of the Portsmouth, Ohio enrichment facility—enriched to 97.7 percent, a level produced exclusively at Portsmouth, which had only one commercial customer: NUMEC.

Testimony from the ground backed up the data. In March 1980, FBI agents interviewed a former NUMEC employee who stated that in early 1965 he had encountered armed strangers on the NUMEC loading dock loading what appeared to be canisters of Highly Enriched Uranium (HEU) onto a truck—with a shipping manifest indicating the material was bound for a Zim-Israel shipping line vessel headed to Israel. A gun-toting guard ordered him to leave, and a NUMEC manager later threatened him to keep his mouth shut about what he had seen. Former CIA Tel Aviv station chief John Hadden, who served from 1963 to 1967, later described NUMEC as “an Israeli operation from the beginning” and told investigators that Israel’s removal of the material was relatively straightforward compared to the Eichmann kidnapping.

In April 1968, CIA Director Richard Helms wrote to Attorney General Ramsey Clark—in a memo that remains classified—reporting that HEU processed at Apollo had likely ended up at Dimona and requested the FBI resume its investigation. Despite this, in 1969 J. Edgar Hoover halted the FBI investigation that Helms had requested after the Atomic Energy Commission declined to revoke Shapiro’s security clearance, citing insufficient grounds for prosecution. The CIA recorded that FBI investigators “indicated that even if they came up with a case, it was extremely unlikely that Justice and State would allow it to come to trial.” The Nixon administration simultaneously adopted Israel’s preferred policy of nuclear ambiguity, agreeing in a secret 1969 meeting between Nixon and Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir not to press Israel on its nuclear program. Henry Kissinger’s July 16,1969 memo to Nixon had already outlined the philosophy: “What we really want at a minimum may be just to keep Israeli possession from becoming an established international fact.”

During the Ford Administration, in February 1976, Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) Chairman William Anders invited CIA Deputy Director for Science and Technology Carl Duckett to brief senior NRC officials. Instead of dismissing the rumors, Duckett stunned the audience by confirming the CIA’s belief that Israel had illegally obtained highly enriched uranium from NUMEC and used it to develop its first nuclear weapons. President Ford’s aide James Connor summarized it plainly to Ford: “The good news is that Israel definitely has the Bomb and can take care of itself. The bad news is that the stuff came from Pennsylvania.” Attorney General Edward Levi then wrote a remarkable memo to President Ford listing multiple federal statutes that may have been violated, stating his belief not only that uranium had been unlawfully removed from Apollo, but that federal officials themselves may have committed felonies by concealing the events after the fact.

During the Carter Administration, Carter was briefed during the presidential transition, and his National Security Advisor’s staff concluded, “The CIA case is persuasive, though not conclusive.” Yet despite Carter’s public identity as a champion of nuclear nonproliferation, newly declassified documents show his administration worked to keep the NUMEC story under wraps out of concern for relations with Israel. As Ford’s close adviser James Connor later told journalist John Fialka, the investigative trail had grown cold: “You could look at all the documents and ask yourself whether something had happened here. The answer was probably yes. Then the question was whether you could do anything about it, and the answer was no.” When confronted decades later about why the Carter administration covered up the evidence, National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski was dismissive: “What are we going to say to the Israelis, ‘Give it back?'”

Congress conducted its own inquiries but reached no resolution. The House Interior Committee, chaired by Rep. Morris Udall, conducted oversight hearings from 1977 to 1980. Udall personally interviewed Shapiro. When a BBC interviewer asked him in 1979 whether he thought the Israelis had taken HEU from Apollo, Udall replied: “If someone had me write in an envelope whether a diversion occurred or did not occur and that I would be put to death if I answered wrong, I suspect I would have to put in the envelope that I believe there was a diversion.” A General Accounting Office report on the matter—titled Nuclear Diversion in the U.S.? 13 Years of Contradiction and Confusion and classified for decades—found that the CIA and FBI had refused to cooperate with the investigation, noting: “We believe a timely, concerted effort on the part of these three agencies would have greatly aided and possibly solved the NUMEC diversion questions, if they desired to do so.”

Israeli officials have never acknowledged the NUMEC diversion. The most high-profile response came in a 1977 CBS 60 Minutes interview when Mike Wallace asked Prime Minister Menachem Begin directly whether Israel had stolen bomb-grade uranium from the United States. Begin neither denied it plainly nor engaged with the substance, instead ridiculing the premise: “From time to time I read in the press the most fantastic stories—how everywhere Israel snatches away uranium from America and from Europe. It belongs to the James Bond stories.” When Wallace pressed, “Not so?” Begin replied, “I don’t pay any attention to them.”

When Rafi Eitan died in March 2019, the Mossad’s official statement said his “operations cannot be publicized but they contributed greatly to the security of the State of Israel.” The New York Times initially included a reference to the uranium disappearance in Eitan’s obituary but removed it after pressure from the media watchdog CAMERA, replacing it with a correction noting only that “it was never shown conclusively that he had had an important role in it.”

Victor Gilinsky, former NRC commissioner, and Roger Mattson, a former NRC physicist who investigated NUMEC, published a landmark reassessment in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 2010 titled “Revisiting the NUMEC Affair,” which stated plainly: “When the known facts are put together, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that Israel probably did steal highly enriched uranium from the United States.” Mattson went on to publish a full book, Stealing the Atom Bomb, through the National Security Archive in 2016. Grant F. Smith, director of the Institute for Research on Middle Eastern Policy, also published Divert! NUMEC, Zalman Shapiro and the Diversion of US Weapons Grade Uranium into the Israeli Nuclear Weapons Program in 2012, based on exhaustive FOIA requests.

To this day, the NUMEC affair remains unresolved. Key CIA and FBI files are still classified or heavily redacted. No criminal charges were ever filed against anyone, and Zalman Shapiro died in 2016 at age 96. Roger Mattson, who spent decades investigating the affair, put it simply in a public lecture: “My conclusion is the material went there [Israel].”

The Apollo Affair stands as a cautionary tale of how American foreign policy can be corrupted from within, how institutional silence becomes its own form of complicity, and how the most documented case of nuclear diversion in American history was buried by the very officials charged with preventing it. It is yet another indication that the first loyalty of many American Jews is to Israel, not America. Rep. Castro’s May 2026 letter represents a rare attempt to pierce the silence that has surrounded these events, but the precedents established over six decades of official denial remain formidable obstacles to the transparency he seeks.

NUMEC was never an accounting error, but rather a clear-cut act of espionage that our leaders chose to ignore. This pattern of complicity continues because our political establishment is trapped beneath the weight of an unshakeable Jewish supremacist power structure.