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."