CIA's Google's Guantanamo Disinfo Agents and stock fraudster money launderers ARE Evil

SRA International part of CIA's In-Q-Tel  Silicon Valley and stock market infiltration vehicles and subsidized by U.S. taxpayers because U.S.only the government is corrupt and stupid enough to pay for their 'services' has now returned to the stock market since I complained about them in 2005 and are now listed as CSRA on NY Stock Exchange and advertise even during Superbowl to attract possibe investor victims to their worthless share only subsidized by govwernment agencies CIA gets them 'work' with.Although SRA is a known CIA company ,' the government has hired the same firm, SRA International, to serve both the prosecution and defense teams, sparking concerns ...', 

The U.S. Government Has Been Outsourcing The Gitmo Trials

https://www.buzzfeed.com/.../the-us-government-has-been-outsourcing-the-gitmo-tria...

May 3, 2016 - What's more, the government has hired the same firm, SRA International, to serve both the prosecution and defense teams, sparking concerns ...

SRA International,Mantas Inc.,CIA and Bellador Group - UK Indymedia

https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2005/12/330499.html

Dec 24, 2005 - Does CIA have a stake in Mantas ? It certainly has an investment in its parent companySRA International and its 'NetOwl' web search engine.

sra international google netowl

http://politicalandsciencerhymes.blogspot.com/2018/05/stanford-universitygoogle-and-cia-sra.html

Guantanamo,Stanford University,Google And CIA SRA International War And Finance Cyber Criminals

CIA's Google Connected SRA International Major Stock Fraud Money Launderers Control Guantanamo Trials,Covers Up CIA,Israeli.et.al.,involvement in 9-11

How can a CIA created 'public company' that sold its own worthless shares in a boiler room in Kuala Lumpur called Bellador Group  in 2005 and whose anti-money laundering software failed to stop worthless penny stock frauds from being run from Charles Schwab accounts now be the broker for Guantanamo guilt or innocence in any fair tril ? And when the CIA along with Israelis who guarded Logan Airport and U.S. DEFENSE software on SEPTEMBER 11,2001 how can the CIA be considered an unbiased party in the Guantanamo 911 cover up trials ?

Below you will see I, Tony Ryals,was mentioned by both the NY Post as well as NY Times dealbook blog for complaining about CIA 's SRA International's shares being promoted by a boiler room in Kuala Lumpur.I used the indymedias to voice that complaint although both the NY Post and te NY Times made sure they didn't mention eirther SRA International nor Bellador Geroup by name  theywere both named by me in indymedia posts I made in or around 2005,Now although I exposed SRA as a CIA company at that time with White House and other government agency 'IT' business and a Google like Netowl search system and Mantas anti-money laundering business that sold its own shares through a suspect boiler room in Kuala Lumpur the U.S. FBI and SEC did nothing but protect their criminal offshore money laundering with stock shares activity !

The Cloud Panopticon: Google, Cloud Computing and the ...

https://www.counterpunch.org/.../the-cloud-panopticon-google-cloud-computing-and...

May 12, 2017 - In June 2007, Privacy International, a U.K.-based privacy rights watchdog, ... SRA's NetOwl program, for example, has been described by a ...

Spy-Fund Story vs. Spy-Fund Story - DealBook - The New York Times

https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2006/05/18/spy-fund-story-vs-spy-fund-story/

May 18, 2006 - In doing a search of 'sra international'on offshorebusiness.com ... Agency(CIA) funded venture capital firm, we employ 'NetOwl' text mining ...

CIA's CSRA Advetrtises In Super Bowl To Ilegally P... - wolfblitzzer0

wolfblitzzer0.blogspot.com/2018/05/cias-csra-advetrtises-in-super-bowl-to.html

May 11, 2018 - political and science rhymes: CIA's SRA International Major Stock . ... Google,Netowl,SRA International Guilty In CIA Torture Of Guantanamo ...

Guantanamo,Stanford University,Google And CIA SRA - political and ...

politicalandsciencerhymes.blogspot.com/.../stanford-universitygoogle-and-cia-sra.htm...

May 1, 2018 - CIA's Google Connected SRA International Major Stock Fraud ... and other government agency 'IT' business and a Google like Netowl search ...

with Google and SRA International - political and science rhymes

politicalandsciencerhymes.blogspot.com/.../google-sra-international-cia-google-sra.ht...

Apr 19, 2018 - wolfblitzzer0: CIA's SRA International,Guantanamo,W Bush,Bill Clinton . ... Agency(CIA) funded venture capital firm, we employ 'NetOwl' text ...

wolfblitzzer0

wolfblitzzer0.blogspot.com/2018/05/cias-csra-advetrtises-in-super-bowl-to.html

May 11, 2018 - No one else would hire these Guantanamo torturing cover up scumbags posing as ...Google,Netowl,SRA International Guilty In CIA Torture Of .

ISB Partners with Google and SRA International on Cancer Genomics ...

www.frontlinegenomics.com/.../isb-partners-google-sra-international-cancer-genomics...

Oct 14, 2014 - ISB, Google and SRA International are going to make it easier to access and analyse genomic data. The NIH's National Cancer Institute (NCI) ...

https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/05/12/the-cloud-panopticon-google-cloud-computing-and-the-surveillance-industrial-complex/

Google also works with some of the top players in the surveillance industry, notably Lockheed Martin and SRA International. SRA is listed as a Google “enterprise partner” – more than a hundred such partners are listed on the Google website. Both companies, Lockheed and SRA, have engineered and sold data-mining software to the intelligence agencies. SRA’s NetOwl program, for example, has been described by a blogger at Pennsylvania State University, who watched the application in action at a corporate recruiter forum, as “searching all kinds of documents using Google for a certain person.” In response to our inquiries for further information on these programs and how they might have been developed in cooperation with Google, a Lockheed Martin spokesperson told us, “The work we do with Google is exclusively related to their Google Earth system.” SRA International’s vice president for public affairs, Sheila Blackwell, states, “We don’t discuss the specifics of our intelligence clients’ business.”

Former CIA officer Robert Steele says that the CIA’s Office of Research and Development had, at one point, provided funding for Google. According to its literature, ORD has a charter to push beyond the state of the art, developing and applying technologies and equipment more advanced than anything commercially available, including communications, sensors, semi-conductors, high-speed computing, artificial intelligence, image recognition and database management. Steele says that Google’s liaison at the ORD is Dr. Rick Steinheiser, a counterterrorism data-mining expert and a long-time CIA analyst. (No CIA response about Steinheiser’s work was forthcoming.)

Then, there are the intelligence officials allegedly working at Google’s Mountain View headquarters. When tech guru Stephen Arnold first revealed this information in the 2006 OSS conference. Anthony Kimery, a veteran intelligence reporter at Homeland Security Today, followed up with a report alleging a “secret relationship” between Google and U.S. intelligence. Google was “cooperat[ing] with U.S. intelligence agencies to provide national and homeland security-related user information from its vast databases,” with the intelligence agencies “working to ‘leverage Google’s [user] data monitoring’ capability as part of an effort to glean from this data information of ‘national security intelligence interest’ in the war on terror.” In other words, Google’s databases – or, some targeted portion – may have been dumped straight into the maw of U.S. intelligence agencies.

Like the giants of the surveillance-industrial complex, Google has backed its federal sales force in Reston, Virginia, with a D.C. lobbying operation – spending $2.9 million on lobbying in 2009 – to make sure that privacy is not a priority in the Obama administration. It also works with several industry-supported interest groups: the Interactive Advertising Bureau, the Technology Policy Institute, and the Progress & Freedom Foundation, whose mission statement espouses “an appreciation for the positive impacts of technology with a classically conservative view of the proper role of government… Those opportunities can only be realized if governments resist the temptation to regulate, tax and control.” All these groups are funded by Google, along with a who’s-who of communications behemoths. Their mission: subvert any congressional legislation extending Fourth Amendment-style prohibitions to the data-mining private sector. Their argument, per the Technology Policy Institute: “More privacy … would mean less information, less valuable advertising, and thus fewer resources available for producing new low-priced services” – in other words, privacy is a threat to the economy.

Google has also managed to install favorites in the White House. Andrew McLaughlin, formerly chief of Google’s Global Public Policy and Government Affairs division while also serving as assistant treasurer for Google’s NetPAC lobby, has been appointed as Obama’s deputy chief technology officer for Internet policy, despite protests from privacy advocates. Vivek Kundra, now posted as the Obama administration’s chief information officer at the Office of Management and Budget, formerly served as the chief technology officer for the city of Washington, D.C., where he ditched the use of Microsoft programs for municipal operations in favor of Google products. Concerns were heightened last spring by an administration initiative, proposed in Senate Bill 773, to grant the executive branch authority to disconnect and assume some measure of control over private networks in a declared “cybersecurity emergency.” That could be a quarantine operation to isolate and defeat a viral attack. It could also be an excuse for censorship of certain sites – or, for the cybersecurity agencies to data-mine where they have been hitherto forbidden. Google could be declared “critical infrastructure” in such an emergency, and its management temporarily assumed by federally certified “cybersecurity professionals,” as defined in S.773. It’s not wholly unfeasible that Google’s massive and much coveted behavioral profiles could then be fed into the NSA’s computers. And even without S.773, a long accumulation of executive orders over three decades has likely laid the groundwork for executive authority to take over critical communications networks in a “national emergency.”

But long before such an emergency comes to pass, if ever, the government and the regiments of data-mining companies it contracts with are seeing eye to eye. The commercial surveillance complex and the security surveillance complex have many common interests and methods: the ad gurus’ neuromarketing research complemented by the intel agencies’ longstanding research into mind control, from the CIA’s MK-ULTRA to the NSA’s current “cognitive neuroscience research”; the profiling of political behavior for campaign advertising complemented by the DHS’s elastic definitions of dissidents and “potential terrorists.”

Google is now anonymizing IP addresses from search logs after nine months, down from its previous eighteen-month retention policy. Company spokesperson Chen states, “We’re committed to using data both to improve our services and our security measures for our users and to protect their privacy, and we remain convinced that our current logs retention policy represents a responsible balance.” This is in contrast to Microsoft, which after six months throws out the search query data altogether. “Remember that totally anonymized search queries can be linked together to build an identity,” says Bankston. “Why does Google need to store our data perpetually? They’re very vague about it.”

Indeed, Google could, without violating the law, reveal a lot more about how it cooperates with the intelligence agencies – how many requests for information it receives, from what government entities, how many it complies with. “They could talk about all this, but they don’t,” says Bankston. “Google may not care a lot about your privacy, but they care a whole helluva lot about your perception of your privacy. To remind people of the risk of government access to your data is anathema.”

This article originally appeared in the April print edition of CounterPunch magazine.

Christopher Ketcham is a freelance reporter in Brooklyn, NY. Write him at cketcham99@mindspring.com or find more of his work at christopherketcham.com.

Travis Kelly is a writer, cartoonist and web designer in Moab, UT. Write him at tkelly@citlink.net or find more of his work at traviskelly.com.

Research support for this article was provided by The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute.

North Korea ? Trump, U.S. Puppet Government Protects Dangerous Israeli Nuclear Military Complex - Weinstein Abuses Women,Hollywood Israeli Arnon Milchan Rapes the world and America for Israeli nukes.....

North Korea ? Trump, Israeli Controlled U.S. Government Protects Dangerous Hollywood Nuclear Military Complex - Hollywood Israeli Arnon Milchan Rapes the world and America for Israeli nukes.....

 Israeli agents charged with buying fissile material and state-of-the-art technology found their way into some of the most sensitive industrial establishments in the world. This daring and remarkably successful spy ring, known as Lakam, the Hebrew acronym for the innocuous-sounding Science Liaison Bureau, included such colourful figures as Arnon Milchan, a billionaire Hollywood producer behind such hits as Pretty Woman, LA Confidential and 12 Years a Slave, who finally admitted his role last month.

"Do you know what it's like to be a twentysomething-year-old kid [and] his country lets him be James Bond? Wow! The action! That was exciting," he said in an Israeli documentary.

Milchan's life story is colourful, and unlikely enough to be the subject of one of the blockbusters he bankrolls. In the documentary, Robert de Niro recalls discussing Milchan's role in the illicit purchase of nuclear-warhead triggers. "At some point I was asking something about that, being friends, but not in an accusatory way. I just wanted to know," De Niro says. "And he said: yeah I did that. Israel's my country." - .theguardian.com

North Korea ? Trump Billionaire Controlled U.S. Government Protects Dangerous Israeli Nuclear Military Complex


North Korea ? Trump,U.S. Government Protects Dangerous Israeli Nuclear Military Complex


https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/15/truth-israels-secret-nuclear-arsenal

The truth about Israel's secret nuclear arsenal

Israel has been stealing nuclear secrets and covertly making bombs since the 1950s. And western governments, including Britain and the US, turn a blind eye. But how can we expect Iran to curb its nuclear ambitions if the Israelis won't come clean?

Julian Borger

Wed 15 Jan 2014 18.18 GMTFirst published on Wed 15 Jan 2014 18.18 GMT

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 Israel's nuclear reactor at Dimona. Photograph: Getty Images

Deep beneath desert sands, an embattled Middle Eastern state has built a covert nuclear bomb, using technology and materials provided by friendly powers or stolen by a clandestine network of agents. It is the stuff of pulp thrillers and the sort of narrative often used to characterise the worst fears about the Iranian nuclear programme. In reality, though, neither US nor British intelligence believe Tehran has decided to build a bomb, and Iran's atomic projects are under constant international monitoring.

The exotic tale of the bomb hidden in the desert is a true story, though. It's just one that applies to another country. In an extraordinary feat of subterfuge, Israel managed to assemble an entire underground nuclear arsenal – now estimated at 80 warheads, on a par with India and Pakistan – and even tested a bomb nearly half a century ago, with a minimum of international outcry or even much public awareness of what it was doing.

When the former speaker of the Knesset, Avraham Burg, broke the taboo last month, declaring Israeli possession of both nuclear and chemical weapons and describing the official non-disclosure policy as "outdated and childish" a rightwing group formally called for a police investigation for treason.Despite the fact that the Israel's nuclear programme has been an open secret since a disgruntled technician, Mordechai Vanunu, blew the whistle on it in 1986, the official Israeli position is still never to confirm or deny its existence.

Meanwhile, western governments have played along with the policy of "opacity" by avoiding all mention of the issue. In 2009, when a veteran Washington reporter, Helen Thomas, asked Barack Obama in the first month of his presidency if he knew of any country in the Middle East with nuclear weapons, he dodged the trapdoor by saying only that he did not wish to "speculate".

UK governments have generally followed suit. Asked in the House of Lords in November about Israeli nuclear weapons, Baroness Warsi answered tangentially. "Israel has not declared a nuclear weapons programme. We have regular discussions with the government of Israel on a range of nuclear-related issues," the minister said. "The government of Israel is in no doubt as to our views. We encourage Israel to become a state party to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty [NPT]."

But through the cracks in this stone wall, more and more details continue to emerge of how Israel built its nuclear weapons from smuggled parts and pilfered technology.

The list of nations that secretly sold Israel the material and expertise to make nuclear warheads, or who turned a blind eye to its theft, include today's staunchest campaigners against proliferation: the US, France, Germany, Britain and even Norway.The tale serves as a historical counterpoint to today's drawn-out struggle over Iran's nuclear ambitions. The parallels are not exact – Israel, unlike Iran, never signed up to the 1968 NPT so could not violate it. But it almost certainly broke a treaty banning nuclear tests, as well as countless national and international laws restricting the traffic in nuclear materials and technology.

 Whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu. Photograph: AP

Meanwhile, Israeli agents charged with buying fissile material and state-of-the-art technology found their way into some of the most sensitive industrial establishments in the world. This daring and remarkably successful spy ring, known as Lakam, the Hebrew acronym for the innocuous-sounding Science Liaison Bureau, included such colourful figures as Arnon Milchan, a billionaire Hollywood producer behind such hits as Pretty Woman, LA Confidential and 12 Years a Slave, who finally admitted his role last month.

"Do you know what it's like to be a twentysomething-year-old kid [and] his country lets him be James Bond? Wow! The action! That was exciting," he said in an Israeli documentary.

Milchan's life story is colourful, and unlikely enough to be the subject of one of the blockbusters he bankrolls. In the documentary, Robert de Niro recalls discussing Milchan's role in the illicit purchase of nuclear-warhead triggers. "At some point I was asking something about that, being friends, but not in an accusatory way. I just wanted to know," De Niro says. "And he said: yeah I did that. Israel's my country."

According to Milchan's biography, by Israeli journalists Meir Doron and Joseph Gelman, he was recruited in 1965 by Israel's current president, Shimon Peres, who he met in a Tel Aviv nightclub (called Mandy's, named after the hostess and owner's wife Mandy Rice-Davies, freshly notorious for her role in the Profumo sex scandal). Milchan, who then ran the family fertiliser company, never looked back, playing a central role in Israel's clandestine acquisition programme.Milchan was not shy about using Hollywood connections to help his shadowy second career. At one point, he admits in the documentary, he used the lure of a visit to actor Richard Dreyfuss's home to get a top US nuclear scientist, Arthur Biehl, to join the board of one of his companies.

He was responsible for securing vital uranium-enrichment technology, photographing centrifuge blueprints that a German executive had been bribed into temporarily "mislaying" in his kitchen. The same blueprints, belonging to the European uranium enrichment consortium, Urenco, were stolen a second time by a Pakistani employee, Abdul Qadeer Khan, who used them to found his country's enrichment programme and to set up a global nuclear smuggling business, selling the design to Libya, North Korea and Iran.

For that reason, Israel's centrifuges are near-identical to Iran's, a convergence that allowed Israeli to try out a computer worm, codenamed Stuxnet, on its own centrifuges before unleashing it on Iran in 2010.

Arguably, Lakam's exploits were even more daring than Khan's. In 1968, it organised the disappearance of an entire freighter full of uranium ore in the middle of the Mediterranean. In what became known as the Plumbat affair, the Israelis used a web of front companies to buy a consignment of uranium oxide, known as yellowcake, in Antwerp. The yellowcake was concealed in drums labelled "plumbat", a lead derivative, and loaded onto a freighter leased by a phony Liberian company. The sale was camouflaged as a transaction between German and Italian companies with help from German officials, reportedly in return for an Israeli offer to help the Germans with centrifuge technology.

When the ship, the Scheersberg A, docked in Rotterdam, the entire crew was dismissed on the pretext that the vessel had been sold and an Israeli crew took their place. The ship sailed into the Mediterranean where, under Israeli naval guard, the cargo was transferred to another vessel.

US and British documents declassified last year also revealed a previously unknown Israeli purchase of about 100 tons of yellowcake from Argentina in 1963 or 1964, without the safeguards typically used in nuclear transactions to prevent the material being used in weapons.

Israel had few qualms about proliferating nuclear weapons knowhow and materials, giving South Africa's apartheid regime help in developing its own bomb in the 1970s in return for 600 tons of yellowcake.

 Pictures of the secret Dimona nuclear reactor in Israel, showing where the plant has allegedly been camouflaged. Photograph: space imaging

Israel's nuclear-weapons project could never have got off the ground, though, without an enormous contribution from France. The country that took the toughest line on counter-proliferation when it came to Iran helped lay the foundations of Israel's nuclear weapons programme, driven by by a sense of guilt over letting Israel down in the 1956 Suez conflict, sympathy from French-Jewish scientists, intelligence-sharing over Algeria and a drive to sell French expertise and abroad.Israel's nuclear reactor also required deuterium oxide, also known as heavy water, to moderate the fissile reaction. For that, Israel turned to Norway and Britain. In 1959, Israel managed to buy 20 tons of heavy water that Norway had sold to the UK but was surplus to requirements for the British nuclear programme. Both governments were suspicious that the material would be used to make weapons, but decided to look the other way. In documents seen by the BBC in 2005 British officials argued it would be "over-zealous" to impose safeguards. For its part, Norway carried out only one inspection visit, in 1961.

"There was a tendency to try to export and there was a general feeling of support for Israel," Andre Finkelstein, a former deputy commissioner at France's Atomic Energy Commissariat and deputy director general at the International Atomic Energy Agency, told Avner Cohen, an Israeli-American nuclear historian.

France's first reactor went critical as early as 1948 but the decision to build nuclear weapons seems to have been taken in 1954, after Pierre Mendès France made his first trip to Washington as president of the council of ministers of the chaotic Fourth Republic. On the way back he told an aide: "It's exactly like a meeting of gangsters. Everyone is putting his gun on the table, if you have no gun you are nobody. So we must have a nuclear programme."

Mendès France gave the order to start building bombs in December 1954. And as it built its arsenal, Paris solds material assistance to other aspiring weapons states, not just Israel.

"[T]his went on for many, many years until we did some stupid exports, including Iraq and the reprocessing plant in Pakistan, which was crazy," Finkelstein recalled in an interview that can now be read in a collection of Cohen's papers at the Wilson Centre thinktank in Washington. "We have been the most irresponsible country on nonproliferation."

In Dimona, French engineers poured in to help build Israel a nuclear reactor and a far more secret reprocessing plant capable of separating plutonium from spent reactor fuel. This was the real giveaway that Israel's nuclear programme was aimed at producing weapons.

By the end of the 50s, there were 2,500 French citizens living in Dimona, transforming it from a village to a cosmopolitan town, complete with French lycées and streets full of Renaults, and yet the whole endeavour was conducted under a thick veil of secrecy. The American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh wrote in his book The Samson Option: "French workers at Dimona were forbidden to write directly to relatives and friends in France and elsewhere, but sent mail to a phony post-office box in Latin America."

The Israelis admitted to having a reactor but insisted it was for entirely peaceful purposes. The spent fuel was sent to France for reprocessing, they claimed, even providing film footage of it being supposedly being loaded onto French freighters. Throughout the 60s it flatly denied the existence of the underground reprocessing plant in Dimona that was churning out plutonium for bombs.The British were kept out of the loop, being told at different times that the huge construction site was a desert grasslands research institute and a manganese processing plant. The Americans, also kept in the dark by both Israel and France, flew U2 spy planes over Dimona in an attempt to find out what they were up to.

 Producer Arnon Milchan with Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie at the premiere of Mr and Mrs Smith. Photograph: L Cohen

Israel refused to countenance visits by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), so in the early 1960s President Kennedy demanded they accept American inspectors. US physicists were dispatched to Dimona but were given the run-around from the start. Visits were never twice-yearly as had been agreed with Kennedy and were subject to repeated postponements. The US physicists sent to Dimona were not allowed to bring their own equipment or collect samples. The lead American inspector, Floyd Culler, an expert on plutonium extraction, noted in his reports that there were newly plastered and painted walls in one of the buildings. It turned out that before each American visit, the Israelis had built false walls around the row of lifts that descended six levels to the subterranean reprocessing plant.

As more and more evidence of Israel's weapons programme emerged, the US role progressed from unwitting dupe to reluctant accomplice. In 1968 the CIA director Richard Helms told President Johnson that Israel had indeed managed to build nuclear weapons and that its air force had conducted sorties to practise dropping them.

The Johnson White House decided to say nothing, and the decision was formalised at a 1969 meeting between Richard Nixon and Golda Meir, at which the US president agreed to not to pressure Israel into signing the NPT, while the Israeli prime minister agreed her country would not be the first to "introduce" nuclear weapons into the Middle East and not do anything to make their existence public.The timing could not have been worse. The NPT, intended to prevent too many nuclear genies from escaping from their bottles, had just been drawn up and if news broke that one of the supposedly non-nuclear-weapons states had secretly made its own bomb, it would have become a dead letter that many countries, especially Arab states, would refuse to sign.

In fact, US involvement went deeper than mere silence. At a meeting in 1976 that has only recently become public knowledge, the CIA deputy director Carl Duckett informed a dozen officials from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission that the agency suspected some of the fissile fuel in Israel's bombs was weapons-grade uranium stolen under America's nose from a processing plant in Pennsylvania.

Not only was an alarming amount of fissile material going missing at the company, Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (Numec), but it had been visited by a veritable who's-who of Israeli intelligence, including Rafael Eitan, described by the firm as an Israeli defence ministry "chemist", but, in fact, a top Mossad operative who went on to head Lakam.

"It was a shock. Everyody was open-mouthed," recalls Victor Gilinsky, who was one of the American nuclear officials briefed by Duckett. "It was one of the most glaring cases of diverted nuclear material but the consequences appeared so awful for the people involved and for the US than nobody really wanted to find out what was going on."

The investigation was shelved and no charges were made.

A few years later, on 22 September 1979, a US satellite, Vela 6911, detected the double-flash typical of a nuclear weapon test off the coast of South Africa. Leonard Weiss, a mathematician and an expert on nuclear proliferation, was working as a Senate advisor at the time and after being briefed on the incident by US intelligence agencies and the country's nuclear weapons laboratories, he became convinced a nuclear test, in contravention to the Limited Test Ban Treaty, had taken place.

It was only after both the Carter and then the Reagan administrations attempted to gag him on the incident and tried to whitewash it with an unconvincing panel of enquiry, that it dawned on Weiss that it was the Israelis, rather than the South Africans, who had carried out the detonation.

"I was told it would create a very serious foreign policy issue for the US, if I said it was a test. Someone had let something off that US didn't want anyone to know about," says Weiss.

"It was a fuck-up," one source told him. "There was a storm and we figured it would block Vela, but there was a gap in the weather – a window – and Vela got blinded by the flash."Israeli sources told Hersh the flash picked up by the Vela satellite was actually the third of a series of Indian Ocean nuclear tests that Israel conducted in cooperation with South Africa.

The US policy of silence continues to this day, even though Israel appears to be continuing to trade on the nuclear black market, albeit at much reduced volumes. In a paper on the illegal trade in nuclear material and technology published in October, the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) noted: "Under US pressure in the 1980s and early 1990s, Israel … decided to largely stop its illicit procurement for its nuclear weapons programme. Today, there is evidence that Israel may still make occasional illicit procurements – US sting operations and legal cases show this."

Avner Cohen, the author of two books on Israel's bomb, said that policy of opacity in both Israel and in Washington is kept in place now largely by inertia. "At the political level, no one wants to deal with it for fear of opening a Pandora's box. It has in many ways become a burden for the US, but people in Washington, all the way up to Obama will not touch it, because of the fear it could compromise the very basis of the Israeli-US understanding."

In the Arab world and beyond, there is growing impatience with the skewed nuclear status quo. Egypt in particular has threatened to walk out of the NPT unless there is progress towards creating a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East. The western powers promised to stage a conference on the proposal in 2012 but it was called off, largely at America's behest, to reduce the pressure on Israel to attend and declare its nuclear arsenal.

"Somehow the kabuki goes on," Weiss says. "If it is admitted Israel has nuclear weapons at least you can have an honest discussion. It seems to me it's very difficult to get a resolution of the Iran issue without being honest about that."

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