'Dead' man talking: I helped build the Iranian nuclear reactor

HAARETZ

SYDNEY – In the memoirs that Jeffrey “Shuki” Gould is currently writing, he recounts his years working as a Mossad agent - among other things building what he believes were the foundations of Iran’s only existing nuclear power plant at Bandar Bushehr.

The really strange part is that Gould’s tombstone already stands in Melbourne’s Jewish cemetery, with his service in Israel’s War of Attrition and the Yom Kippur War engraved on it in gold lettering. What the tombstone is missing, apart from his service with the Mossad, is the date of his death.

Now 82 and very much alive, the British-born war veteran has decided to take his after-life into his own hands.

“I wanted to make sure everything was organized,” was how he explained to Haaretz his decision to have the tombstone erected during his lifetime. “It cites my regiment in the Australian Army [he served briefly in Vietnam], my Australian and Israeli army numbers and also that I’m a veteran of wars in Israel.”

Gould, who today lives in a Melbourne nursing home, moved to Israel from Australia as a teenager in 1948. Lured to Israel by the excitement of the Six-Day War, he lived briefly on Kibbutz Yizre’el before moving to Haifa “because I preferred having money in my pocket.” Later, he moved to Arad, where he met his wife, a French-born child Holocaust survivor.

Then came Mossad.

By 1974, Gould says, he was in Iran, which had just established an atomic energy organization. Gould says he spent about a year working at Bushehr as a supervisor in charge of about 800 Afghani and Indian workers. “We were building a naval base,” he says, “but I’m pretty sure part it was the beginning of the atomic plant.”

“Although it’s quite a while ago now, I know it turned out to be the reactor. Some of the foundations that we built were the beginnings of the reactor.”

Gould’s recollections were first published on Monday in Hebrew by Dr. Ran Porat, who runs a website for Israelis in Australia. In the recollections, Gould claims that he and a handful of other Israelis documented the Bushehr plant. “I took photos; I had to take them to [my operator],” he recalls.

As Porat puts it, “Paradoxically, Gould and some other Israelis took part in setting up the nuclear reactor which Israel regards as such a threat today. This reactor became the basis of the advanced Iranian nuclear program as it is today.”

The Bushehr reactor, which was damaged during Saddam Hussein’s invasion in the 1980s, was completed with Russian help and officially opened in August 2010. Despite the reactor being under the control of the International Atomic Energy Agency - and despite the departure in June of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in favor of Hassan Rouhani, who as chief nuclear negotiator from 2003-2005 agreed a deal with France, Germany and the United Kingdom to suspend Iran’s uranium enrichment - Israel remains suspicious.

“His strategy is to be a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said of Rouhani a fortnight ago. “Smile and build a bomb.”

But Gould doubts whether the Iranians would deliver on Ahmadinejad’s pledge to “wipe Israel off the map.” “I personally don’t think they’d use the bomb. India and Pakistan have one and they’ve never used it. Iran wouldn’t have the guts,” he says. “It doesn’t worry me too much. I couldn’t imagine them trying to blow up the Mosque of Omar in Jerusalem.”

Gould says that his time in Iran came to an end after he was targeted in a bombing. As the nation “started to boil” in 1975 and the specter of the Islamic revolution loomed, his cover was blown. “We got attacked in our house overnight by terrorists,” he recalls. “They wired the place and blew it up. I got myself out of Iran. I think they came from Iraq but they knew we were Israeli.”

Later, he says, he was sent on assignment to Africa, although he wanted out of the Mossad by then. But the African mission was soon aborted, according to Gould. “We had a lot of problems, so we had to get out,” he recalls.

Gould says he quit and returned to Australia in 1975. But he’s never lost his love for Israel, returning most years for two months of voluntary service. “I served in three wars – the end of the Six-Day War, the War of Attrition and the Yom Kippur War,” he says, recalling the loss of his best friend on the first day of the 1973 war. “I was in an engineering unit repairing tanks. I was there, on the Israeli side, when they crossed over the Suez. I helped build some of the bridges,” Gould says.

Despite bearing physical scars from his experiences - “I’ve still got a piece of shrapnel in my chest from the Egyptians; every time I go through security it bleeps” - Gould says that he would do it all over again “if I was young enough.”

As for revealing potentially classified information in his memoirs, tentatively titled Apparitions, Gould is fatalistic.

“I’m getting on a bit, I’m 82. What can they do to me?”