HIGH SEAS: Uranium: The Israeli Connection

In the foggy dawn of Nov. 17, 1968, the German-built freighter Scheersberg A (gross tonnage: 1,790 tons) chugged out of Antwerp harbor with a Liberian flag flying from its mast and 560 drums of “yellowcake”—a crude concentrate of uranium—packed beneath its decks. The ship never reached its declared destination of Genoa, Italy. Instead, after 15 days at sea it docked at the Turkish port of Iskenderun on Dec. 2, riding high in the water. Its strategic cargo—200 tons of uranium, worth $3.7 million, that could potentially be used for nuclear weapons—had vanished. The disappearance of the uranium was first disclosed last month by Paul Leventhal, a former counsel to the Senate Committee on Government Operations, at a conference in Salzburg, and the report was confirmed later by European Community officials.

Who had the uranium? And how did they get it? After several weeks of investigation by a team of correspondents, TIME has learned that the Scheersberg As voyage from Antwerp was part of a complex plot concocted by Israeli intelligence agents. Its purpose: to disguise a secret Israeli purchase of much-needed uranium for its French-built nuclear reactor at Dimona in the Negev Desert; an overt purchase might have pushed the Soviet Union into supplying nuclear arms to the Arab states. The Scheersberg A, which is still in service as a tramp steamer under the name Kerkyra, was secretly owned at the time of the uranium caper by the Israeli intelligence service, Mossad. It was one of three ships (another was called the Vita) that Israel used in the late 1960s for secret operations. TIME has discovered that the Scheersberg A was almost certainly involved in the refueling in the Atlantic of five gunboats seized by Israeli agents from the French harbor of Cherbourg in 1969.

In the uranium operation, the Israelis relied on assurances from the West German coalition government of Christian Democratic Chancellor Kurt-Georg Kiesinger that they would be allowed to disguise their purchase as a private commercial transaction in West Germany. In exchange, TIME’S sources say, Israel promised West Germany access to its advanced uranium separation process that can be used to produce nuclear weapons. Asked directly about it, officials in Bonn refused last week either to confirm or to deny any past government involvement in such a deal.

No Hijacking. Investigators for the European Community began looking for the missing uranium several months after the Scheersberg A showed up empty at Iskenderun. They developed evidence that the cargo had not vanished in a hijacking: the uranium was shipped by a firm that knew it would never arrive at its destination in Italy. The firm was a now-defunct German petrochemical company called Asmara Chemie, and it had purchased the uranium—which was mined in what is now Zaire—from the Belgian mineral firm Societe Generale des Minerals. Asmara Chemie had no previous record of buying uranium at all —let alone $3.7 million worth—but on March 29, 1968, Asmara signed a contract to buy 200 tons of uranium oxide. Today the founder of Asmara, Herbert G. Scharf, denies any knowledge of the deal, and one former employee of the firm says, “I assume that somebody must have used our name.”

Several of TIME’S sources have identified a former Asmara purchasing agent and stockholder named Herbert Schul-zen as the Asmara connection. Last week Schulzen, now an executive for Kolloid Chemie, a West German dye-making firm, told TIME he could not comment because “secret service agencies” were involved. He added: “When I read in the papers that for nine years various governments have kept the disappearance of the uranium a secret, I cannot as a private individual comment on what is taking place at a [higher] political level.”

Asmara at first had ordered the uranium for a third party, a Casablanca pharmaceutical-supply company named Chimagar; like Asmara, it had never bought uranium before. “Laughable,” said one of the company’s executives last week when told that the firm—which specializes in processing seaweed—had been named as a recipient of the uranium. Indeed, Chimagar was not a good cover. Morocco is not a member of the Common Market, and no nuclear material can be shipped outside the Community without a special permit.

Thus, in August 1968, the uranium contract was amended. Asmara and the Société Générale informed the Common Market that the ore would be shipped to SAICA, a paint company in Milan that also had never been known to use uranium. SAICA was to mix the uranium with an unspecified substance included in the shipment, then return it to Asmara in the same 560 drums. “They chose us merely to get the uranium out of Antwerp into the Mediterranean,” said null chairman, Francesco Ser-torio, last week; he claims he wondered about the deal at the time. Nevertheless, Sertorio says he received an advance payment from Asmara Chemie of $12,000 for buying equipment to mix and handle the uranium. Apparently Asmara knew that the Scheersberg A, with its barrels of uranium innocently marked “plumbat” (a lead derivative), would never dock in Italy. A few days after the Scheersberg A sailed from Antwerp, Asmara called SAIGA to say the ship was mysteriously lost and told the paint company to keep the $12,000.

The history of the Scheersberg A’s ownership is almost equally mysterious. Less than two months before its fateful sailing from Antwerp, the ship—then known simply as the Scheersberg—was purchased from a Hamburg shipping broker, August Bolten, by a company that was little more than a post office address in Monrovia, Liberia: the Biscayne Traders Shipping Corp., which was incorporated on Aug. 20, 1968, about the time that Asmara Chemie’s final contract for purchase of the uranium was completed. Biscayne took title to the Scheersberg A—for $287,000—on Sept. 27, 1968. The company, which was dissolved in 1971, was almost certainly a front for the Mossad. For more than a year, corporate documents prove, Bis-cayne’s president was Dan Ert, 40, who admitted in 1973 that he was an Israeli intelligence agent.

Ert, who has changed his name to Aerbel and now lives in Herzliya, was a member of an Israeli “hit team” that in 1973 killed an Arab waiter in Lillehammer, Norway, in the mistaken belief that he was a Palestinian terrorist responsible for the Munich massacre of eleven Olympic athletes. A native of Copenhagen who maintained Danish and Israeli citizenship, Ert tried to win his release by telling his flabbergasted Norwegian interrogators that he was a Mossad agent. To prove it, he mentioned that he “owned the ship” that had secretly carried uranium for Israel. (Ert has since denied saying this.) Ert also gave his captors the secret phone number of Mossad headquarters in Tel Aviv. He was convicted of participating in a murder and imprisoned for seven months.

After Biscayne Traders bought the Scheersberg A, in September 1968, the first of many new crews came aboard. But in Rotterdam, on Nov. 15, a Biscayne Traders representative falsely told the crew—composed largely of Spaniards—that they were no longer needed because the ship had been sold again. On the next day, the uranium was loaded in Antwerp, and a hand-picked crew of Israelis boarded the ship for its mysterious voyage.

Only those aboard know precisely what happened during the 15 days after the Scheersberg A left Antwerp. The ship’s officers cannot be traced because they had forged passports and false identities. But one of TIME’S sources talked with a former Israeli crew member in 1973, in the Ivory Coast. According to the sailor, after leaving Antwerp the Scheersberg A sailed straight for the waters between Cyprus and Iskenderun. Without breaking radio silence, it made a rendezvous at night with an Israeli ship that carried a special winch. As two Israeli gunboats hovered near the freighters, the barrels of uranium were transferred in total darkness. Except for an occasional Hebrew command, no one spoke. The uranium, TIME’S sources believe, went to the Israeli port of Haifa, approximately 110 nautical miles from the rendezvous, and the Scheersberg A headed northeast to Iskenderun.

Arrived Empty. Port records confirm that the Scheersberg A arrived empty on Dec. 2. Three days later, most of the Spanish crew who had been dismissed in Rotterdam on Nov. 15 were called back to the ship at Palermo. Curious about its recent travels, some crewmen looked for the ship’s log. They found that the pages for the previous 21/2 weeks had been ripped out.

For almost a year, the Scheersberg A carried out normal freight duties in the Mediterranean and Atlantic. Meanwhile, construction of five missile and torpedo gunboats purchased by Israel neared completion in the French port of Cherbourg. The boats were paid for by Israel, but France had halted all military trade with Arabs and Israelis. On Nov. 17, 1969, five weeks before the Israelis seized the gunboats, the Scheersberg A crew was again told that the ship had been sold. A new crew came aboard, and another mystery voyage began. Port records show that the ship left Almeria, Spain, for a course through the Strait of

Gibraltar and up the French coast just three days before the Cherbourg raid, which took place on Christmas morning, 1969. One of TIME’S sources reports that a refueling rendezvous with the gunboats took place in the Bay of Biscay, 300 nautical miles southwest of the mouth of the Loire — easy sailing distance from Almeria for the Scheersberg A.

Hull Scars. After this rendezvous, the ship arrived in the West German port of Brake on Dec. 30. It was sold by Biscayne Traders on Jan. 5, 1970, to a Greek shipping firm for approximately $235,000—or $52,000 less than the 1968 purchase price. It bore scars on its hull, possibly from having scraped against its sister ship while the uranium was being transferred. The Scheersberg A, by then renamed Haroula, was sold again in 1976, to another Greek firm, the Pidalion Three Co.

The European Community investigation into the whereabouts of the missing uranium was frustratingly incomplete. Two months after the Scheersberg A sailed from Antwerp, the Common Market’s atomic energy agency (Euratom) routinely asked the Italian paint company SAICA whether the uranium had arrived. When told no, Euratom began an inquiry into what it called the “Plumbat Affair.” The search was hampered by the agency’s lack of police powers, and after a few months Euratom called on security forces of the Western nations for help. A West German investigation was abruptly —and mysteriously—halted shortly after it began in 1969.

U.S. officials reacted calmly to Euratom’s report of the missing uranium. Explains one U.S. nuclear expert: “Yellowcake is a very low level mineral, not bomb material.” Only after complicated reprocessing can it be used to make nuclear weapons. It is believed that Israel completed such a reprocessing facility in 1969, and used it to produce a limited number of atomic bombs (TIME, April 12, 1976). The Carter Administration halted all U.S. exports of uranium—including yellowcake—last February, pending a review of U.S. export policies.

In Europe and the U.S., atomic energy officials say that the Plumbat Affair signals a need for tighter surveillance of nuclear shipments. Notes a former Euratom official: “The ways of stepping around international controls are as many as the ways of our Lord.”

The tired old tramp steamer that carried the uranium oxide from Antwerp to the eastern Mediterranean is not likely to be involved in so adventurous a mission again. Last week the salt-caked Kerkyra returned empty to the Greek port of Halkis, after carrying a load of cement to Benghazi in Libya on its regular run. Beneath the paint of the new name, dockside onlookers can still discern welded letters spelling out the old, outlined in cement dust. Scheersberg A has come in out of the cold.