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lution questions for the immediate area; the Apollo facility had been discharging an average of 13,300 gallons of water and waste effluents daily into the nearby Kiskiminetas River, a tributary of the Allegheny River, which is the main source of drinking
water for several communities in the Pittsburgh area.* In October 1977, Jody Powell, President Jimmy Carter's press secretary, publicly announced that "four years of continuing investigation" by the AEC, FBI, and General Accounting Of fice had "failed to reveal" a diversion of uranium to Israel. By the end of the year the NUMEC case was being actively pur sued by the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investiga tions, one of the most competent and aggressive investigative units in the Congress, as well as the House Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment. Carl Duckett and John Hadden, both retired from the CIA, cooperated fully with the subcom mittees; at one point, Duckett telephoned an investigator in the middle of the night and insisted that he go to a pay telephone at a gas station to return the call. He then urged that the investi
gation into Shapiro be carried forward. Hadden, meanwhile, was repeatedly suggesting that the Israeli government had to have a "mole"—a clandestine operative—inside the Atomic En ergy Commission who had protected Shapiro in the early in vestigations of a possible diversion. There was little due process for Shapiro in all of this. The subcommittee investigators seemed to take every one of Duck ett's and Kadden's claims at face value. But it is through those claims that outsiders can begin to understand how the CIA and
the two congressional subcommittees weighed evidence and what kind of internal checks and balances were imposed on their investigations. * An Apollo housewife, Cynthia A. Virostek, eventually began a campaign to in crease public awareness of the potential pollution risk from the plant. In 1990, largely on the strength of her protests, she was elected local councilwoman. Mrs. Virostek, then thirty-five years old, lives with her husband and two sons five hundred feet from the Babcock & Wilcox plant. She became involved after company officials announced in the early 1980s that they were beginning decontamination operations. "That kind of opened my eyes," she said. "I began asking questions about the plant and nobody gave me answers." She then began a relentless campaign, through Freedom of Information inquiries, to force information out into the open. A Pennsylvania health department study eventually noted, Mrs. Virostek said, that her community was the only one in the immediate area to have a statistically significant excess in the number of cancer deaths.