(WMR)—Twenty years ago it would have been unthinkable for a U.S. Navy museum dedicated to naval undersea warfare to all but totally ignore the late Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, the Russian-born “father of the U.S. nuclear Navy.”
However, at the Navy’s Undersea War Museum in Silverdale, Washington, there is nary a mention of Rickover, a man known for his irascible and megalomaniacal ego. The only photograph a visitor to the museum sees is a stock picture of President John Kennedy and Rickover discussing the Polaris missile program. There is no mention of Rickover’s name in association with the photo.
Rickover’s star began to dim in the 1980s when, after his forced retirement, he was found to have solicited and received gifts, including earrings for his wife, from the Navy’s top submarine contractor, General Dynamics. Rickover also accepted a set of buffalo horn-handled fruit knives, Tiffany paperweights with submarine silhouettes etched into them, chauffeur services for him and his son from a New England boys’ camp, combination hotplates and bain-maries, mint julep cups on silver trays, and civilian suit dry cleaning. Oddly, Admiral Rickover sometimes wore civilian suits during sea trials for nuclear submarines.
There were demands by some in the Navy to cancel all contracts with the bribery-ridden General Dynamics and its Electric Boat submarine division, which means the Rickover affair was more than the run-of-the-missile defense contractor scandal.
After six decades of service, Rickover’s forced retirement on January 31, 1982, came as General Dynamics was dealing with questionable cost overruns on nuclear submarine contracts. Rickover also accepted gifts from three other Navy contractors—General Electric, Westinghouse Electric, and the Newport News Shipbuilding & Drydock Co. GE and Westinghouse were also involved in nuclear technology production.
Rickover’s corrupt relationship with General Dynamics may have also led to the leak of sensitive nuclear weapons secrets to Israel. General Dynamics was taken over by Jewish steel magnate Henry Crown, the then owner of the Empire State Building, when he merged his Chicago-based Material Services Corporation with General Dynamics, thus acquiring a majority of the latter’s shares.
Rickover worked closely with and praised Zalman Shapiro, one of the Westinghouse nuclear engineers who worked on the first U.S. nuclear submarine, the USS Nautilus, launched in 1954. Shapiro later formed Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (NUMEC), which between 1957 and 1967 diverted 22 tons of highly-enriched uranium (HEU-235), most of it destined for Navy nuclear submarine contracts overseen by Rickover, to Israel. Shapiro also ran Israel NUMEC Isotopes and Radiation Enterprises Limited (ISORAD), a Mossad front company tasked with illegally acquiring nuclear weapons. NUMEC received its support from leading associates of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), including financier David Lowenthal who worked closely with fellow ZOA member Shapiro, as well as longtime ZOA activist Dalck Feith, the father of Douglas Feith, an architect of the 2003 U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. Shapiro came under FBI scrutiny in 1965 for his nuclear smuggling activities. Shapiro attempted to have his lawyer clear his name with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2009. Shapiro’s lawyer was former Senator Arlen Specter.
Lester Crown, the son of Henry Crown, a General Dynamics board member, was also a major supporter of Israel and, as Michigan Democratic Congressman John Dingell discovered in 1985, a security risk to the United States. Dingell questioned Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger in 1985 about a security clearance granted Crown in 1974. Crown was the subject of a bribery investigation at the same time the Defense Department granted him a security clearance. Crown was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in a scam that involved the payment of bribes to Illinois state senators.
General Dynamics was under intense scrutiny by the administration of President John F. Kennedy for defense contract fraud. Kennedy was also acutely aware that Israel was trying to obtain nuclear material from the United States to develop nuclear weapons. Kennedy told Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol that Israel would never obtain nuclear weapons while he was president.
Kennedy, suspicious of Rickover likely over reports of his contacts with Israel’s nuclear program, was going to force Rickover to retire at the mandatory retirement age of 64 in 1964.
After Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963, Shapiro’s smuggling of nuclear weapon materials to Israel continued without interference and General Dynamics saw new heights of prosperity as the pro-Israeli Lyndon Johnson mired the country into war in Indochina. Rickover was not retired and continued to serve on active duty until 1982 when his hand was caught in the General Dynamics cookie jar.
1974 was the same year that the CIA produced a classified memorandum, titled “Prospects for Further Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons,” where the CIA cited Israel’s “acquisition of large quantities of uranium, partly by clandestine means.” The CIA concluded that Israel produced the Jericho missile to accommodate nuclear warheads.”
In 1979, Israel, with the cooperation of apartheid South Africa and Taiwan, detonated a nuclear weapon in the Antarctic region of the South Atlantic.
Israel has for decades refused to permit whistle-blowing former Israeli nuclear scientist Mordechai Vanunu to emigrate to the United States in order to escape political and religious persecution in Israel. Vanunu, born Jewish, later converted to Christianity. In 1976, Vanunu began working at the top secret Israeli nuclear weapons production facility in Dimona in the Negev Desert.
Israel’s intractable position on Vanunu likely centers on his knowledge of Mossad’s covert supply line of nuclear secrets from the United States and other Western countries during the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. This was the same time period that Rickover was at the top of his game and was known to be in the pocket of companies closely involved with nuclear technology and weapons.
The billionaire Crown family, like Chicago’s Pritzkers, are major supporters of Barack Obama. Obama recently appointed Hyatt Hotel heiress Penny Pritzker as Secretary of Commerce, even though she has been the subject of numerous federal fraud investigations. The Crowns and Pritzkers ensure that Obama continues to tilt American foreign policy heavily toward Israel.
As for Rickover, the Navy, still smarting from the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty, saw a chance to purge one its submarine museum of references and it did. Those who run the Naval Undersea Museum deserve praise for giving Hyman Rickover a much-deserved cold shoulder.
Previously published in the Wayne Madsen Report.
Copyright © 2013 WayneMadenReport.com
Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and nationally-distributed columnist. He is the editor and publisher of the Wayne Madsen Report (subscription required).
