Missing Uranium and the CIA’s Silence on President Johnson

By Roy Castellano · September 11, 2026

Two pages of a CIA memorandum remain blacked out, hiding the mechanism by which hundreds of pounds of enriched uranium vanished from Pennsylvania to fuel a nuclear program.

The risk of a nuclear-armed state in the Middle East is not a matter of theoretical physics; it is a matter of stolen weight. Hundreds of pounds of highly enriched uranium vanished from a facility in the Pittsburgh suburbs, leaving a trail of suspicion that the United States government spent decades attempting to manage rather than resolve.

What survives of the internal reckoning is an archival description of a briefing, a distilled summary that captures the texture of the CIA's evasion without providing the full transcript. This summary describes an August 26, 1977, memorandum for the record, authored by Theodore G. Shackley, the CIA’s Associate Deputy Director for Operations, regarding a briefing he provided to Representative Morris K. Udall of Arizona. Udall, a prominent Democratic legislator who would later become a leading contender for the presidency, was joined by his committee staffer, Dr. Henry Myers. The meeting was not a casual exchange; it was a controlled release of information intended to settle a growing scandal.

The Missing Weight

The public record establishes the stakes of the NUMEC affair: between 200 and 600 pounds of highly enriched uranium disappeared from the Nuclear Materials and Engineering Corporation in Apollo, Pennsylvania. The suspicion, which has endured for decades, is that this material was diverted to support the burgeoning nuclear weapons program in Israel. The CIA’s role in this matter was to provide a veneer of oversight while managing the political fallout of a potential breach of non-proliferation norms.

In the briefing, Shackley addressed the technical mechanism of the theft with a bluntness that only a redaction can temper. The record shows that the CIA redacted nearly two pages of the answer to the question of how one would go about diverting material from NUMEC to Israel. The refusal to explain the how is the most damning silence in the file. If the mechanics of the diversion were as simple as an accounting error or a localized theft, there would be no need to black out two pages of a briefing to a sitting Congressman.

Furthermore, Shackley claimed the Agency had never obtained "hard intelligence" that clearly linked NUMEC to the subsequent production of uranium-based nuclear weapons by Israel. This claim stands in direct opposition to the technical reality of the era. The pattern suggests that the CIA possessed definitive technical proof of the link between the missing NUMEC material and the environment surrounding Dimona, the site of Israel's nuclear operations, yet lacked the political authorization to categorize it as intelligence. By withholding the designation of "hard intelligence," Shackley allowed the Agency to maintain a posture of ignorance while the material was already being processed into weapons.

Document imagery from nsarchive.gwu.edu From the files: nsarchive.gwu.edu

A Coordinated Narrative

The briefing was not an isolated event. The memorandum notes that Shackley's presentation to Udall followed the same outline used in previous briefings for Senator Glenn and Congressman McCormack. This was not an organic investigation; it was a coordinated narrative-management exercise. The goal was to preemptively limit the scope of Congressional inquiry into how a private American company could lose the most sensitive material on earth without triggering an immediate national security alarm.

This management extended to the handling of key witnesses. When Udall or Myers pressed on whether the FBI had interviewed Zalman Shapiro—the chemist and inventor at NUMEC whose work was central to the development of the reactor that powered the world's first nuclear-powered submarine—Shackley responded that the Agency had "no knowledge of any direct debriefing of Mr. Shapiro by the FBI."

This claim creates a highly suspicious vacuum. The line between the CIA’s foreign intelligence mandate and the FBI’s domestic criminal jurisdiction is where the truth of the NUMEC diversion was buried. By asserting a lack of knowledge regarding the FBI’s actions, Shackley constructed a firewall. This firewall ensured that neither agency could be held fully accountable for the oversight failure in a single, consolidated record. If the CIA claims it didn't know what the FBI was doing, and the FBI is busy with its own internal interviews, the theft remains a ghost in the machine.

The Johnson Loophole

The most politically sensitive moment of the briefing concerned the involvement of the executive branch. The question posed to Shackley was direct: could President Lyndon B. Johnson, a man widely recognized as a friend to Israel, have encouraged the flow of nuclear materials to the Israelis?

The response from Shackley was a masterclass in the use of the qualifier. He stated: "There is no information in the CIA files which are currently available to us which would indicate that President Johnson had ever undertaken any action which would have resulted in a diversion of nuclear materials to Israel."

The phrasing "currently available to us" is the pivot upon which the entire deception turns. It is a loophole designed to protect the presidency from the charge of state-sanctioned proliferation. It does not say that Johnson was not involved; it says the Agency's files do not show it. The desk's reading is that the missing information regarding President Johnson resides in a Presidential Daily Brief (PDB) or a Special Access Program (SAP) archive that is legally sequestered from standard operational files. By using this language, Shackley provided the Agency with plausible deniability while leaving the door open for a truth that is officially, and perhaps permanently, out of reach.

The Institutional Firewall

The pattern of the NUMEC briefing points to a conclusion that the official record avoids: the diversion of nuclear materials was not a security failure, but a sanctioned clandestine operation managed via a channel outside the standard CIA reporting chain. The redactions, the coordinated outlines, and the strategic ignorance regarding the FBI all point toward a high-level decision to permit the enrichment of Israel's nuclear capabilities at the expense of American domestic security.

If the shape of this file is what it appears to be, the CIA was not investigating a theft; it was managing a transfer. The briefings provided to Udall and his peers were designed to satisfy the requirement of Congressional oversight without ever providing the substance that would make that oversight meaningful. The Agency was not looking for the missing uranium; it was ensuring that the questions about the uranium remained within a strictly defined perimeter.

What a full release would show is a seamless handoff between American industrial capacity and Israeli strategic necessity, overseen by an executive branch that prioritized a specific geopolitical alliance over the strict enforcement of nuclear safeguards. The documents that remain withheld are not protecting secrets of a theft; they are protecting the legacy of a policy. The cost of this policy was the integrity of the American non-proliferation regime, paid for by the silence of men like Shackley and the strategic blindness of the committees meant to watch them.

Missing Uranium and the CIA’s Silence on President Johnson

The Missing Weight

A Coordinated Narrative

The Johnson Loophole

The Institutional Firewall

Sources