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plant in Apollo, Pennsylvania. The company's owner, Zalman Mordecai Shapiro, a devout Jew with close ties to Israel, in sisted that the uranium loss—first reported by Shapiro in 1965 —was routine, an inevitable by-product of the difficult task of enrichment. Duckett and many others in the intelligence com munity thought otherwise. Duckett acknowledged that he had no evidence that Shapiro's uranium had been diverted to Israel, but "made an assumption" that it had while preparing the up dated Israeli estimate. "Assuming a crude device, Israel could have made four weapons with the Shapiro material," Duckett said, and the initial draft of the Memo to Holders revealed that
there was new evidence suggesting that Israel had three to four nuclear weapons. Without the Teller report and the suspicions about Shapiro, Duckett acknowledged, the CIA didn't have much to go on. The Agency had been unable to determine whether Israel had
built, as suspected, an underground chemical reprocessing plant at Dimona. The Agency also had not been able to pene trate any of the military commands or intelligence services of Israel. And no Israeli had defected to the United States with
nuclear information. The National Security Agency and its electronic eavesdropping also had not been much help, Duckett said, although it had provided early evidence suggesting that some Israeli Air Force pilots had practiced bomb runs in a manner that made sense only if nuclear weapons were to be dropped.
Thin as its evidence was, Duckett was now willing to state in a top-secret written report that Israel was a nuclear power. The revised estimate was more than a little bit sensitive, Duckett knew, and he cleared it first with Dick Helms. The CIA direc
tor told Duckett not to publish the estimate in any form and also declared that he himself would be the messenger with bad tidings. Helms walked the Duckett information into the Oval Office and gave it to the President. Johnson exploded, as Helms later recounted to Duckett, and demanded that the document
be buried: "Don't tell anyone else, even [Secretary of State] Dean Rusk and [Defense Secretary] Robert McNamara." Helms did as he was told, but not without trepidation: "Helms