'The batteries had to be strong enough to convey the information and had to have a range to pick up what the Egyptians were saying to their allies.' Shapiro said in an interview that a year before the Six-Day-War, Mossad chief Meir Amit got in touch with him: 'He could feel that Egypt was planning something and therefore, wanted Israel to have the ability to gather intelligence about the Egyptian army.' According to him, Amit asked him to supply the batteries in favor of tiny listening devices that would connect to telephone lines and wireless transmissions. Shapiro's company developed a tiny version of this mechanism for the operation of pacemakers as well. It is a kind of a small nuclear reactor that runs on a material called strontium-90, which can generate a high level of energy over many years. To this day, NASA spacecrafts like Voyager 1 and 2 that departed earth about 40 years ago are still powered by these batteries.

They were used by satellites, spacecrafts and weather monitoring stations in remote and hard-to-reach areas, such as Antarctica. The special batteries he supplied to the listening facilities were developed at Mound Laboratories in Ohio in 1954 and were considered a scientific revolution. He denied, was not tried, but at the same time, was not cleared of the suspicions until the day of his death.

In the past, it was suspected that hundreds of kilograms of fissionable material of military quality had disappeared from his company's warehouses and had been smuggled into Israel. He was the owner of the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corp (NUMEC), which operated in the city of Apollo, Pennsylvania, and manufactured nuclear equipment. During his scientific career, he was one of the reactor developers of the first nuclear submarine, he developed nuclear fuels of various kinds and registered countless patents. He was born in Ohio to a religiously observant family, some of whom perished in the Holocaust. So who is Zalman Shapiro, the man to whom Israel owes so much? He was an inventor, and a genius in chemistry and physics. The interviews dealt with Israel's intelligence preparations for the war, but were rejected over the years by censorship. Many of the details exposed in the article were made known to Yedioth Ahronoth ten years ago, in a series of interviews I had with the late Meir Amit, who was the head of the Mossad during the Six-Day War. (Res.) Amiram Levin, is displayed in the Museum of the Yom Kippur War in Cairo. One of the devices, which was set up by Maj.

According to her, former Mossad official Rafi Eitan approved the transfer of batteries to Israel.Īccording to foreign reports, the Sayeret Matkal Special Forces unit was the one that planted the listening devices in the heart of the Arab states. Thomas claims in the article that the information obtained from the secret facilities operated by the batteries paved the way for Israel's crushing victory in the Six-Day War.

2048 - מלחמת אחים by Zalman Shapiro