Milchan should have been busted in 1985 for smuggling triggers for nuclear bombs, when a business associate, Richard Kelly Smyth, was indicted by a federal grand jury in Los Angeles on charges of smuggling 810 krytrons to Israel. Because krytrons are used as detonators or triggers for nuclear weapons, their export is tightly regulated.

In 1973, Smyth started a company called Milco International, Inc., financed, according to the Washington Post, by Milchan, hence its name. Up to 80 percent of Milco's business was reportedly with Milchan and Israel.

In 1980, the federal indictment asserted, Smyth and Milco sent 610 krytrons to Israel without the necessary licenses, plus another 200 in 1982.

The 1985 indictment identified the Israeli buyers of the nuclear triggers as Heli Trading Ltd. and Milchan Brothers, two of Milchan's Israel-based companies. Federal authorities told NBC News in 1993 that Milchan also shared in the profits derived from the sales.

Announcement of the indictments came four days after the Israeli Defense Ministry, reacting to news of the grand jury probe, admitted that it had the devices, known as krytrons.

The krytrons were shipped between 1979 and 1983 to an Israeli firm under contract to the government for defense work. The Israeli Ministry of Defense returned only 469 of the krytrons, and Smyth vanished a week before he was to appear for trial.
 

PROTECTING ISRAEL

Robert C. Bonner, the U.S. attorney in Los Angeles , refused to comment on questions about whether the Israeli government had been involved in the illegal actions.

State Department spokesman Edward Djerejian said, "I can only note that the indictment does not mention any Israeli citizen."

Djerejian added that the United States "has expressed its serious concern to the Israeli government about this alleged violation of U.S. law" and had been assured that Israel will cooperate with the continuing U.S. investigation "to the full extent permitted under Israeli law."

"Smyth's disappearance, and the unwillingness of Israeli officials to cooperate with U.S. investigators on the case, left federal authorities unable to proceed," Robert Windrem of NBC News reported in July 2001.

Although Milchan is not mentioned in the indictment, a Milco employe, Gretel Siler, who identified herself as corporate treasurer of Milco, told The Washington Post that Milchan had been associated with Milco in various export transactions and had been involved in purchasing the krytrons from the manufacturer, EG&G, of Wellesley, Mass.

Milchan denied being involved in the $60,000 krytron deal, but told "60 Minutes" (CBS) that he had allowed the Israeli government to use his companies as conduits for trading with the United States.

"I'm not saying I'm an innocent person - but in this specific case, I knew nothing about it," Milchan told Frank Rose of Premiere magazine. In any case, Milchan was never charged in the case.

Robert Mainhardt, a nuclear scientist and former director of Milco, told "60 Minutes" that he had resigned after Milchan had asked him to obtain advanced nuclear reactor designs and a supply of uranium hexachloride, which is used in the enrichment of bomb-grade uranium.

Mainhardt's fellow directors at Milco, Arthur Biehl and Ivan Getting began to feel uneasy sometime in 1982, the Washington Post reported. The Washington Post did a series of articles about this smuggling. The most important excerpts are the following:

When they joined the board of directors of Milco International in 1980, Biehl and Getting recalled, they thought the company's primary business was developing aerospace software for U.S. military and space programs. They had been recruited by the company's owner, Richard K. Smyth, while serving with him on an influential panel that advises the U.S. Air Force on advanced technologies, work that required them to have top-secret clearances.

But they soon realized that Smyth, a California-based computer expert, spent most of his time trying to buy equipment with military applications, including a uranium byproduct known as "green salt" that can be processed into weapons-grade uranium, for the government of Israel. Often, they said, the sales were made through an Israeli middleman, Arnon Milchan, a flamboyant businessman who sold arms before becoming a producer of such popular movies as the recent Brazil.

"I didn't have any evidence there was anything improper," Biehl said. "I just thought it was a strange way to do business . . . . I wondered why the Israelis were paying fees to {Milco and Milchan} when they could get the same equipment directly" using U.S. foreign aid.

In late 1982, Biehl and Getting resigned from Milco's board of directors, in part because of their misgivings about Smyth's dealings with Milchan and Israel.

Asked why Israel didn't buy the krytrons through its 200-member procurement staff in New York, which buys military equipment with $1.8 billion in annual U.S. aid, Yossi Gal, spokesman with the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C. told the Post that Israel occasionally used "independent agents" to make purchases.

Under U.S. laws, Smyth needed a munitions license from the State Department to ship the krytrons overseas. If he had tried to obtain one, according to a knowledgeable State Department source, he would have been turned down because Israel has not signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

Smyth's relations with Israel began in the early 1970s when he was working for North American Rockwell as a chief engineer in its avionics division and traveled to Israel to help set up a subsidiary. There, he met Milchan, who was Rockwell's representative and "point man" with the Israeli government, according to an associate of Smyth from that period.

In January 1973, Smyth founded Milco while still working at Rockwell. His associate recalled Smyth once saying that Milchan provided money to start Milco; this associate said he believes that the name Milco was derived from Milchan.

At the time that Milco was founded, former U.S. intelligence officials said, the Central Intelligence Agency knew that Israel was working to perfect a solid-fuel tactical missile, known as the Jericho, that could carry nuclear warheads. In late 1973, Smyth's associate recalled, he saw Milco order forms for several barrels of a butyl compound used to bind explosive powders into solid rocket fuel. Smyth said he was shipping the butyl to Milchan through another company he owned in Houston, the associate recalled.

Smyth's next known contact with Israel occurred in 1975, about a year after he left Rockwell to run Milco full time. On Oct. 30 of that year, Smyth applied for a munitions license to ship 400 krytrons to Heli Trading Inc., Milchan's company in Israel.

The application, which is filed in court records in Los Angeles, said that the "end user" would be Rehovot Instruments Ltd. and that the krytrons would be used as "remotely located intrusion detectors."

Smyth filed the application after being told by an official from an unnamed U.S. intelligence agency that a license was required, according to court records. Smyth met with the official and told him that "Arnon Milchan {had} requested that a certain number of krytrons be shipped to Israel," according to a letter filed by William Fahey, the prosecutor in the current case.

Internal Milco records, provided by former Smyth associates, show that the company struggled financially from 1975 to 1980. It landed several small contracts for less than $25,000 with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Air Force for studies on computer software for avionics systems in advanced aircraft, the MX missile and a small ship defense missile called the Patriot.

It was also in 1980, the federal indictment alleged, that Milco sent 610 krytrons to Israel in 11 shipments without obtaining the needed licenses. Smyth bought them from EG&G in Salem, Mass., the sole producer of the switches in the United States.

In mid-1981, Smyth listed several contracts with Heli Trading to acquire training simulators for Hawk air defense missiles, a voice scrambler and lasers. He also cited "probable" contracts for a computerized flight control system for Israel's Lavi fighter plane, and thermal batteries and gyroscopes.

James Russell, vice president of Incosym Inc., a maker of gyroscopes in Thousand Oaks, Calif., said he sold Milco several $10,000 gyroscopes in that period. Smyth told him the navigation aids would be used on Israeli navy patrol boats. Milco also won a flight control contract for the Lavi in 1983, according to a listing in Aviation Week magazine.

Smyth's world started to crumble in early 1983 after someone broke into Milco's offices and took several thousand dollars worth of computer and software equipment. Because he was doing some classified U.S. government work and feared some records of it might have been stolen, Smyth wrote a lengthy report about the theft for the Pentagon and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, then-company attorney Brian R. Carter said.

Milco company records revealed that Milchan's companies had ordered large quantities of missile-related equipment and materials between 1977 and 1982. Among the nuclear items listed were the 810 krytrons, plus neutron generators, high-speed oscilloscopes and high-voltage condensers, according to a 1996 paper on Israel's Nuclear Weapon Capability by the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control.

In August 1985, U.S. Customs subpoenaed the financial records linking Smyth and Milchan. The records were neither turned over nor found. Smyth and his wife disappeared just days before his scheduled trial, which almost certainly would have involved Milchan.

"There were so many...indictments that they probably decided just to get out," Mainhardt, who operates a security business in Dublin, Calif., said. "If I had to make a guess, I'd say they're in Israel."

"Let's assume that there's nothing that Israel and the United States do separately," Milchan told Bardach. "Smyth, a U.S. fugitive for more than a decade, was last seen in Herzliya Pituach, an affluent suburb of Tel Aviv, where Milchan owns a home," Bardach wrote in 2000.

In July 2001, Smyth was arrested in Malaga, Spain.

Smyth pleaded guilty in December to one count of violating the Arms Export Control Act and one count of making a false statement to Customs agents. Proscutors dropped 28 other counts.

On April 29, 2002 Smyth was sentenced to 40 months in federal prison and fined $20,000 for illegally exporting to Israel the devices that are used as triggers for nuclear weapons.

Smyth, 72, was immediately made eligible for parole at his sentencing.
 

MILCHAN AND PERES

"In Israel, Milchan spends much of his time with best friend Shimon Peres," Bardach wrote.

"Milchan's political connections would prove to be the foundation of his future empire," she wrote. "In addition to agriculture, there would be biotechnology, advertising, aerospace and the biggest jackpot of them all--arms."

In 1953, at age 30, Shimon Peres was appointed by Israel's first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, to become Director-General of the Ministry of Defense. Within three years, Peres had laid the foundation for Israel's nuclear weapon program, according to the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control.

Peres started Israel's program to develop nuclear power and nuclear weapons by convincing the French to help Israel build a secret nuclear reactor beginning about 1957. He chose France as the major supplier, arranged the sale of a nuclear reactor, and spent the next decade overseeing the construction of the Dimona nuclear weapon production complex.

Peres is the one who came up with Israel's most often repeated nuclear declaration. At a April 1963 meeting in the White House, Peres responded to President John F. Kennedy's questions about Israel's nuclear program by saying: "Israel will not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons to the Middle East." Two years later, Prime Minister Levi Eshkol elevated Peres's words to Israel's official nuclear line.

Sources & Recommended Reading
 

Note: The original article written by Bollyn is here: www.rumormillnews.com 108925 His list of sources and recommendations were sending you to other sites, such as rense.com and truthseeker.co.uk. We switched some of the links to the same articles that are on our site since we don't want to promote deceptive sites.

 

Bardach, Ann Louise, "The Last Tycoon" Los Angeles Magazine, April 2000
www.bardachreports.com/articles/oa_20000400.html

Bollyn, Christopher, "Intel Expert Says 9-11 Looks Like A Hollywood Show" December 2001
by_Bollyn_EuroSpooks.htm

Bollyn, "9/11: What Did Rupert Murdoch Know?" October 3, 2003
Bollyn-Murdoch-Netanyahu.html

Bollyn, "Mossad - The Israeli Connection To 9-11" April 14, 2005
Bollyn-mossad-911.html

Bollyn, "Some Survivors Say Bombs Exploded in WTC" September 2001
Bollyn_Bombs-in-WTC.html

Bollyn, "'Series of Explosions' in WTC - BBC" June 28, 2002
www.rumormillnews.com 20617

Bollyn, "9-11 Mossad Agents Admit Mission: 'Our Purpose Was To Document The Event'" June 28, 2002
Bollyn-dancing-Israelis.html

Bollyn, "Why was Kobi Alexander Allowed to Flee? The Israeli Fugitive, Odigo, and the Forewarning of 9/11" August 24, 2006
Bollyn-Kobi-Alexander.html

Bollyn, "The Great Game: The War For Caspian Oil And Gas" October 14, 2001
Bollyn-Caspian-Oil.html

All three articles also at: www.bollyn.com/index/?id=10372

Lima, Paolo, "Five men detained as suspected conspirators" The Bergen Record, September 12, 2001
Five-men-detained-on-911.html

McArthur, Shirl, "A Conservative Estimate of Total Direct U.S. Aid to Israel: $108 Billion" Washington Report, July 2006
www.wrmea.com/archives/July_2006/0607016.html

Washington Post, "Computer Expert Used Firm to Feed Israel Technology" October 31, 1986

Washington Post, "L.A. Man Indicted in Export of Potential Nuclear Bomb Component to Israel" John M. Goshko, May 17, 1985

Washington Post, "U.S. Asks to Inspect Israeli Atom Sites To Verify Use of Restricted Device" John M. Goshko, May 15, 1985

Washington Post, "Israel Got U.S.-Made Devices" John M. Goshko, May 14, 1985

Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, "Israeli Nuclear Program Pioneered by Shimon Peres," The Risk Report, Volume 2 Number 4, July-August 1996
www.wisconsinproject.org/countries/israel/Israel-nuclear-peres.html
 

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