The 1968 Controversial Disappearance of 200 Tons of Uranium: Israel’s Alleged Involvement
- Kejsi Kajo
- Nov 7
- 4 min read
Disclaimer: For informational and educational purposes only.
Israel's intelligence service, Mossad, allegedly carried out a covert operation to illicitly transport 200 tons of yellowcake uranium from Belgium to Israel in 1968, approximately a year after France, Israel's former primary nuclear partner, ceased supplying uranium fuel to the nation-state following the Six-Day Arab-Israeli War.
The nuclear material, valued at $3.7 million, was reportedly shipped aboard the German-built freighter Scheersberg A, which was "secretly owned at the time of the uranium caper by the Israeli intelligence service", according to a 1977 TIME investigative article titled "Uranium: The Israeli Connection".
The uranium oxide was legally contracted to a paint company in Italy that "had never been known to use uranium". The article documented that Scheersberg A set sail on November 17 and, "after 15 days at sea", it unexpectedly "docked at the Turkish port of Iskenderun", with the yellowcake uranium no longer aboard. The "strategic cargo", "that could potentially be used for nuclear weapons", had "vanished".
The company that shipped the uranium, Asmara Chemie, which "had no previous record of buying uranium at all", supposedly "knew it would never arrive at its destination in Italy". A few days after the freighter left the Belgian port of Antwerp, Asmara notified the Italian paint company that "the ship was mysteriously lost".
A "former Asmara purchasing agent and stockholder", Herbert Schulzen, told TIME, "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".
The article claims that Scheersberg A was bought by a small company in Liberia in September of 1968, Biscayne Traders Shipping Corporation, which was believed to be "almost certainly a front for the Mossad". Its president, Dan Ert, reportedly admitted that he was an Israeli intelligence agent during an interrogation with the Norwegian authorities in 1973, where he was arrested for being "a member of an Israeli 'hit team' that killed an Arab waiter in Lillehammer, Norway, in the mistaken belief that he was a Palestinian terrorist".
According to "Uranium: The Israeli Connection", Ert confessed that he "'owned the ship' that had secretly carried uranium for Israel" in an attempt to "win his release", although he later denied making that statement. He was convicted of "participating in a murder" and sentenced to seven months in prison.
A few days before Scheersberg A departed on "its mysterious voyage", a Biscayne Traders representative replaced the existing crew with a "hand-picked crew of Israelis", who "[could not] be traced because they had forged passports and false identities". TIME spoke to a "former Israeli crew member", who stated that Scheersberg A "sailed straight for the waters between Cyprus and Iskenderun", where it "made a rendezvous at night with an Israeli ship that carried a special winch".
The "sailor" revealed that 200 tons of uranium, placed in barrels that were "innocently" labeled "plumbat"*, which inspired the name "Operation Plumbat", were "transferred in total darkness", while "two Israeli gunboats hovered near the freighters". TIME's sources believed that, following the silent exchange, the unidentified "Israeli ship" transported the uranium powder to the Israeli port of Haifa.
TIME's team of correspondents determined that Scheersberg A's "voyage" was "part of a complex plot concocted by Israeli intelligence agents". "Its purpose," the article reported, was "to disguise a secret Israeli purchase of much-needed uranium for its French-built nuclear reactor at Dimona in the Negev Desert". Supposedly, "an overt purchase might have pushed the Soviet Union into supplying nuclear arms to the Arab states".
The Wikipedia page of "Operation Plumbat" mentions that one of the first journalists to expose the "Mossad covert operation", Paul Leventhal, a former U.S. Senate attorney, stated in a 1977 disarmament conference that "the stolen yellowcake shipment was enough to run a reactor such as Dimona for up to ten years".
In the non-fiction investigative book "The Plumbat Affair", British authors Elaine Davenport, Paul Eddy, and Peter Gillman wrote that the security services of Belgium, Italy, and West Germany, along with "their partners in the European Common Market and their allies in NATO" were "greatly preoccupied" with the disappearance of the uranium. They had "tried to find out what had happened": "who could have organized the operation which had resulted in the cargo apparently being spirited away".
"All of them," the authors stated, "including the American CIA, drew a blank".
* (the Latin term for lead)
