600 Pounds of Uranium and the Lie General Lee Gossick Told Congress

By Eleanor Voss · September 16, 2026

A general's denial of nuclear theft and a CIA director's contradictory memory kept the destination of enriched uranium secret for decades

Six hundred pounds of highly enriched uranium disappeared from a Pennsylvania suburb, and the government spent a decade pretending it hadn't. For the families in Apollo and Parks Township, the cost was a permanent, invisible risk to their soil and water; for the world, the cost was the silent birth of a nuclear arsenal in a region where the United States officially forbade such weapons.

This account is drawn from the archive's description of a 1978 internal probe, a summary that serves as a map to a larger, still-hidden history.

"No Evidence of a Diversion"

In the summer of 1977, General Lee Gossick, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's (NRC) executive director for operations who spent his career managing the intersection of military discipline and nuclear oversight, stood before the Udall and Dingell committees. These House of Representatives bodies were tasked with investigating why the NRC had failed to track a massive quantity of nuclear material. Gossick’s testimony was a masterclass in institutional denial: he told the committees there was no evidence of a diversion from the NUMEC plant in Apollo.

According to the public record, the NUMEC affair involved the loss of between 200 and 600 pounds of enriched uranium, with long-standing suspicions that the material had been funneled to Israel's nuclear weapons program. To deny the existence of evidence regarding this diversion was not a mere lapse in memory; it was a strategic firewall. If the evidence did not exist, the NRC did not have to explain why it had been ignored, and the U.S. government did not have to admit it had looked the other way while a proliferation treaty was being shredded in the Middle East.

But the firewall had a leak. The record shows that by February 1978, the NRC was conducting its own internal inquiry into whether Gossick had lied to Congress. The investigation was handled by the NRC’s Office of General Counsel (OGC), the internal legal arm tasked with managing the agency's exposure, and the Office of Inspector and Auditor (OIA), the internal watchdog that, in this instance, functioned as a shield for the agency's executive leadership.

February 1976

The collision between Gossick’s testimony and the truth centered on a single man: Carl Duckett. As the CIA's deputy director for science and technology and the founder of the agency's science and technology operations, Duckett was the bridge between raw intelligence and policy. He knew exactly what the agency had gathered about the uranium in Apollo.

The record establishes a critical timeline: in February 1976, more than a year before Gossick faced the House committees, Duckett had met with NRC representatives. During that meeting, Duckett informed the NRC that the CIA had garnered evidence of a diversion from Apollo. This is the point of failure. The CIA had the proof; the NRC had the proof; and yet, when Gossick stood before the Udall and Dingell committees, he claimed the proof did not exist.

The connection here is a closed loop of complicity. Duckett provided the intelligence to the NRC in 1976, and Gossick used that same intelligence to calibrate his lie in 1977. The internal inquiry of 1978 was not an attempt to find the uranium, but an attempt to see if the lie had become a liability. The OGC and OIA interviewed Duckett to record what he had told the NRC, effectively using the CIA director to audit the General's perjury.

The Controlled Source

If the shape of this file is what it appears to be, the internal inquiry was never intended to produce a referral for prosecution. The pattern suggests that Carl Duckett was utilized as a controlled source to provide a 'corrective' narrative. By interviewing Duckett, the OGC and OIA could determine exactly how much Duckett remembered and how much he was willing to say. This allowed the NRC to manage its liability with the House committees without exposing the full extent of the collusion between the NRC and the CIA.

The desk's reading is that the inquiry's narrow focus on the act of perjury—the fact of the lie—rather than the fact of the diversion indicates a containment strategy. The government was not worried about the missing uranium; they were worried about the paper trail of the cover-up. The uranium was already gone, likely already forged into cores and tucked into silos. The only thing left to protect was the reputation of the institutions and the secrecy of the recipient.

This is where the record becomes an exercise in erasure. The report is divided into volumes, but the archive provides only Volume III, which contains the interviews. Volume II, which the record notes contained the documents referenced by interviewees and the specific questions from congressional staff, is missing.

The Missing Volume

In the world of archival silence, a missing volume is a confession. The desk's reading is that the absent Volume II likely contains the specific technical contradictions and 'smoking gun' documents that rendered Gossick's testimony untenable. Volume III is merely the record of the cleanup; Volume II was the crime scene. By withholding the documents and the congressional questions, the archive protects the specifics of the CIA's intelligence failure and the NRC's willingness to lie about it.

Even within the surviving interviews, the censorship continues. The record shows that ISCAP, the interagency panel that decides what the public is allowed to see of the government's secrets, redacted material in the section where Duckett recounted the CIA’s evidence surrounding the NUMEC affair.

These redactions are not about protecting "sources and methods" in the abstract. They are shaped precisely to hide the identity of the foreign state recipient of the diverted materials. By blacking out Duckett's account, ISCAP transformed a catastrophic security breach and a case of congressional perjury into a permanent diplomatic secret. The redactions ensure that the link between the Pennsylvania suburbs and a foreign nuclear program remains a suspicion rather than a documented fact.

If the full record were released, it would show that the NRC and CIA did not just lose the uranium; they coordinated a campaign to deceive the legislative branch of the U.S. government to protect a strategic ally. The pattern reveals a pipeline of silence: from the NUMEC plant to the CIA's science and technology office, through the NRC's executive office, and finally into the black ink of the ISCAP censors.

The desk's reading is that this entire cycle—the diversion, the perjury, and the subsequent internal scrub—was a rehearsal for the way the U.S. manages its nuclear shadows. The priority was never the recovery of the material or the integrity of the congressional record; it was the preservation of a clandestine nuclear order. The people of Apollo were left with the radiation, and the House committees were left with a lie, while the missing Volume II remained locked away to protect a secret that was already common knowledge in the halls of power.

600 Pounds of Uranium and the Lie General Lee Gossick Told Congress

"No Evidence of a Diversion"

February 1976

The Controlled Source

The Missing Volume

Sources