The secret search for uranium in Cold War Morocco

In October 1939, President Franklin Roosevelt received a surprising letter warning him of the dangers of a recent scientific discovery: the nuclear fission of uranium. Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard were the letter’s authors, though only Einstein signed his name. Known today as the Einstein letter, the missive warned of more than bombs or a new source of motive power. Its main concern was, as the authors put it, “the problem of securing a supply of uranium ore for the United States.” The two physicists feared that most of the world’s known supply of uranium would end up in Nazi Germany’s hands, which would give the Germans a monopoly over fission’s potential power.

Thus was kindled an obsession with uranium that would persist through several US administrations. The interest in uranium ore led not only to a frenzied effort to prospect the American West for radioactive minerals but to a worldwide diplomatic and geological effort to secure uranium wherever it might be found, in whatever country—even if it involved undercover agents, secret agreements with rivals, and private enterprises serving as fronts for covert prospecting operations.

One such enterprise, the Moroccan Research and Mining Company (Société Marocaine de Recherches et d’Exploitations Minières, SOMAREM), explored the soils and sands of Morocco from 1953 to 1955. Although it recovered virtually no uranium, SOMAREM served its US and French creators well. Its secret uranium exploration yielded geophysical and geopolitical lessons that are still important today.

France’s Atomic Energy Commission

The atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki made clear the new strategic centrality of uranium. As World War II came to an end, the US, along with the UK and Canada, made an attempt to find and secure the world’s uranium supply. ¹ At the time, geologists believed uranium to be rare and primarily found in a few high-grade deposits: The Shinkolobwe mine in the Belgian Congo, the Joachimsthal mine in Czechoslovakia, and the Eldorado mine at Port Radium in Canada. Secret wartime research had shown that coal and oil shales and monazite sands might also contain uranium. But American geologists were convinced that exploitable occurrences of uranium were rare enough to warrant an attempt to control them all.

The US was not alone in its pursuit of uranium. Not only was the USSR organizing a giant program to build nuclear weapons, friendlier rivals were also starting up nuclear programs. In October 1945, Charles de Gaulle’s provisional government decreed the creation of the French Atomic Energy Commission (Commissariat à l’Énergie Atomique, CEA). France entrusted the CEA with sole responsibility for the development of nuclear energy and technologies, including the possibility of weapons.

The CEA leadership took to its mission with youthful energy. One of the commission’s first tasks was to locate a source of uranium for France’s new atomic program. In the CEA’s first five years, nearly half the CEA’s limited budget went to uranium prospection and mining, including the creation of sections devoted to exploration, borehole drilling, mineralogy, and topography. CEA officials in Paris anxiously awaited reports from their prospectors, who were exploring possible deposits in central France and the French colonies.

US agents followed the French prospectors carefully. Not only was the US Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) involved in the surveillance, but the State Department was contributing to the nuclear spy effort. Washington distributed Geiger counters to embassies and consulates worldwide. Records show that the US embassy in Paris became a way station for minerals. Samples flowed in from the abandoned wartime German program and from programs in France, Western Europe, and elsewhere. Samples that showed high levels of radioactivity were forwarded across the Atlantic Ocean to the AEC laboratory in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

Determined to control the global flow of uranium, the US proved capable of countering the ambitions of rival programs, including the French program. In 1950, with a small stock of prewar uranium and with promising deposits discovered in central France, the CEA was ready to ink a deal to provide uranium to the Norwegian atomic effort. That arrangement would have given the French access to Norway’s supply of heavy water and established France as an international atomic presence. US officials got wind of the prospective deal and stepped in. They convinced their British counterparts to offer the Norwegians a stock of available Dutch uranium and kept the French out. ²

Uranium in the protectorate of Morocco

With the high value of even a modest stock of uranium clear, Jean Orcel, the renowned mineralogist at France’s National Museum of Natural History and the CEA’s leading consultant on uranium, recommended sending CEA prospectors to Morocco. Orcel knew Morocco well. In September 1945, he deposited a sealed envelope at the French Academy of Sciences in which he reported that he had spotted “a greenish-yellow mineral, immediately calling to mind a possible uranium salt” at an unspecified location in Morocco. ³ The CEA leadership was ready to act.

But Morocco presented several complications. The 1912 Treaty of Fez had declared the North African nation a French protectorate, and France controlled it much like a colony. However, Morocco’s sultan was technically the ruler of a sovereign state. That semiautonomy, carefully cultivated by Sultan Mohammed V after World War II, was enough to keep the CEA from having an automatic claim to any Moroccan uranium, as it did in the French colonies. In the Moroccan protectorate, uranium fell into the category of common metals. The world’s most strategically sensitive substance was, legally speaking, fair game to all prospectors. In addition, the CEA was strapped for resources: Throughout the 1940s it could send but one geologist to Morocco to explore the situation in that vast, promising land.

The CEA’s inability to exploit opportunity in Morocco was apparent at the close of 1948, when the Mining Co of Bou Azzer, in cooperation with protectorate mining services, detected traces of uranium in its cobalt mine, located in the Anti-Atlas mountain range (see the map in figure 1). Shortly afterwards, lenses of pitchblende were detected in the Azegour molybdenum mine southwest of Marrakech. The CEA sent reinforcements, hoping it could scrape together the prospectors necessary for a concerted search of the entire protectorate.

Quietly, the US sent its own assets. A geologist with the Economic Cooperation Administration—the Marshall Plan’s administrative arm—reported on the Bou Azzer finding. The AEC wanted to know more. It drafted metallurgist Frank McQuiston Jr, deputy director of its raw materials division and a consultant for the Newmont Mining Corp, to gather intelligence. McQuiston had seen the Shinkolobwe mine in the Belgian Congo and the uranium-laced gold fields of the Witwatersrand in South Africa; now, on the pretext of a visit to Newmont’s zinc mine in eastern Morocco, he reported on traces of uranium found in cobalt and molybdenum mines and in the vast phosphate deposits at Khouribga, and on rumors of uranium elsewhere in the protectorate. ⁴

A fragile diplomacy

As 1951 brought more reports of uranium in Morocco, the AEC and the US State Department agreed that it was time to make a move. But how? The diplomatic sensitivity of the situation was acute. Not only were rival French uranium prospectors on the ground in Morocco, the French protectorate was becoming increasingly important to US Cold War strategy. A December 1950 French–US agreement permitted the US Air Force to build bases for staging bombers on Moroccan soil, adding massively to its military presence there.

At the same time, with the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950, maintenance of US alliances with Europe became an increasingly high diplomatic priority. The French mattered, and the fragile Fourth Republic, which went through 21 governments from 1946–58, was a constant cause for concern. The US desperately wanted to avoid destabilizing the French polity, which was constantly being pulled from the right by the Gaullists and from the left by the Communists. Yet sending US scientists to search for a strategic resource in a French protectorate would outrage both factions.

The good news for the US was that the French government had replaced Communist Frédéric Joliot-Curie as the CEA’s top scientist with politically moderate Francis Perrin (figure 2). Perrin, along with his CEA administrative counterpart Pierre Guillaumat, was vocal about his desire to expand France’s uranium production. The Americans detected a chance for cooperation.

On 11 February 1952, the US ambassador in Paris reached out to the French prime minister to open secret negotiations on a deal to hunt for uranium in Morocco. Officials from both countries were anxious to keep negotiations secret from domestic groups that might expose them for political gain, such as the Communists and Gaullists. Furthermore, the Americans had no desire to tip their hand to the British and reveal they were pursuing an arrangement outside the customary US-British-Canadian approach to monitoring and securing uranium resources.

Any partnership in Morocco would need more than just cooperation between scientists from rival atomic programs. It would also have to permit the US to navigate between the Scylla of irritating the French and upsetting the delicate Fourth Republic and the Charybdis of inflaming nationalist Moroccan sentiment against the Americans themselves at a time when the US presence in Morocco was growing daily.

What ensued was a year-long negotiation involving scientists, engineers, technocrats, and diplomats. No longer undercover, McQuiston impressed Guillaumat and other French officials with the chemical-concentration techniques the Americans were willing to share. A promise of future access to what the French Foreign Ministry reported were “jealously guarded secret American techniques” persuaded French officials that Morocco’s strategic importance was increasing in American eyes. French officials expressed a belief that US interest in Morocco—secret uranium exploration efforts explicitly included—reinforced France’s position in its protectorate, “the presence of France being the guarantor of order and security in this country.” ⁵

Not that US officials were uncritical of French rule. They voiced their displeasure during the summer of 1952, when the French administration strong-armed the sultan of Morocco into accepting “reforms” that granted French colonials civic powers in a country where they were legally foreigners. The episode humiliated the sultan, enraged Moroccans, and disappointed US hopes of gradual reforms in favor of Moroccan autonomy.

However, what mattered most to the American administration was not political reform but strategic stability—and the predictable circulation of uranium. When Thami El Glaoui, Marrakech’s powerful feudal potentate and an immensely wealthy man with enormous agricultural and mining interests, got wind of uranium within his reach, he attempted to convince AEC officials to send geologists directly to him. US officials instantly refused—the last thing they wanted was a local strongman (and rival to the sultan) willing to deal uranium to the highest bidder.

Much in terms of nuclear fuel and Moroccan geopolitics was riding on a uranium agreement with the French.

In search of uranium

US and French officials entered into a secret alliance on 2 March 1953 to prospect for uranium in Morocco. Two months later, those reading the Moroccan protectorate’s Bulletin Officiel discovered the announcement of a new private enterprise, SOMAREM, created for the “prospection and research of all deposits of metallic mines and, more generally, all mineral deposits.” The announcement contained not a word about uranium. The real arrangement behind this public facade was known to only a few officials in the US State Department and the AEC and to the French Foreign Office and the CEA.

SOMAREM’s board of directors and its shareholders were officials from the CEA and various protectorate mining offices—not a genuine investor or mining entrepreneur to be found among them. A secret three-man “managing committee”—comprised of one man each from the AEC, the CEA, and the protectorate—assured US influence. The majority of funding came from the AEC. Any uranium mined would be divided on a sliding scale, with an increasing percentage going to the AEC as more uranium was found.

The new partners were eager to get started. A preliminary survey in April took US and French geologists to Azegour, Bou Azzer, and the upper Moulouya valley immediately north of Midelt. The heat of the Moroccan summer was difficult to endure. That set a pattern: prospecting started in the autumn and lasted through winter and spring, and summer provided a moment for annual accounting and limited prospecting operations in the cooler High Atlas range.

Even in Morocco’s cooler seasons, the search was not easy. There were merely indications of uranium in Morocco’s granites and scheelite deposits. And although the phosphates of the eastern Khouribga region contained uranium minerals, they were hardly uranium laden: The Khouribga deposits contained just 0.03–0.05% uranium by mass, and 0.1% had become the cutoff for calculating viable reserves. Even if those grades rose as one went south, the problems of extraction and concentration would remain.

While French geologists began cooperating with their US counterparts, the French government ignored US diplomats’ advice. In August 1953 they sent Mohammed V into exile and installed a more compliant relation on the throne. Moroccans were outraged. A bloody campaign pitting incensed Moroccan revolutionaries against pitiless French colonial officials ensued, all while thousands of radio sets were sold to pick up dissenting broadcasts from Cairo.

US officials did not bother to inform Moroccan leaders that they disapproved of the French actions. On the United Nations (UN) Security Council, they voted against investigation of the incident. Their primary concern was the safety of their strategic and military interests and the stability of France at yet another crisis point in the short history of the Fourth Republic.

There is every reason to think that the covert search for uranium factored into US support for the French position in Morocco. When US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles stated in November 1953 that “there is no slightest wavering in our conviction that the orderly transition from colonial to self-governing status should be carried resolutely to a completion,” the French were privately assured that his words were for public consumption only. ⁶ After all, the French and the Americans were intimately linked in a secret geological research effort, the strategic payoff for which might be enormous.

Prospecting in Morocco

Prospecting season opened in autumn 1953 with three SOMAREM prospecting teams in Morocco: two ground-based teams equipped with jeeps and one airborne team with a Piper Super Cub (see figure 3). When not in the field, prospectors lived in the Moroccan capital of Rabat, where SOMAREM maintained headquarters, living quarters, a mineralogical laboratory, a workshop, and a garage. In that first full 1953–54 prospecting season, the teams—always including at least one US member, according to the March 1953 agreement—continued the work they had begun in the upper Moulouya valley the previous spring and also commenced exploration of the Anti-Atlas range. Although there were a number of promising leads, nothing was judged to be immediately exploitable.

The Americans present among the SOMAREM teams brought important skills that the French prospectors had to learn. Royal Stuart Foote, who not only had published on airborne exploration for uranium but had invented a gamma-ray-detection device particularly suited to sedimentary formations, led the airborne prospection team. John Beall was an experienced mining engineer and a specialist in phosphates. Other US geologists came with first-hand experience of the many metal–uranium associations in the American Southwest. In addition, the CEA’s top uranium geologists and engineers spent three weeks in the US, starting at AEC headquarters in Washington, DC, and ending at the sedimentary uranium deposits in Colorado and Utah. The trip added considerably to their knowledge of uranium deposits, which, as US geologists had discovered, were turning out to be more varied, widespread, and exploitable than previously thought.

In 1954 SOMAREM added two more ground-based prospecting teams and reported “most honest and efficient” collaboration between various geologists and prospectors, despite “the diversity of languages and origins.” ⁷ Some of SOMAREM’s work in the 1954–55 prospecting season followed on the heels of their previous searches, such as examination of the Permo-Triassic sandstone of Argana in the western reaches of the High Atlas Mountains and test works at Choukrane on the southern rim of the phosphate fields. At the same time, teams explored farther south and west. They discovered the most interesting indicator in a quartz vein in the Ordovician sandstones at Cheib er Ras, northwest of Taouz, and began borehole drilling there. Tellingly, however, while SOMAREM now claimed 25 separate research permits and the AEC speculated on the presence of a uranium province, no deposits of commercial importance turned up.

Meanwhile, the situation in Morocco deteriorated. Violence worsened through 1954. Leading colonial figures were assassinated, and strikes crippled vital industries. Just as the rising tensions in Morocco called into question SOMAREM’s purpose as a symbol of French–American unity, sea changes in US atomic policy cast doubt on SOMAREM’s purpose as a secret meeting point for the two atomic programs.

The end of SOMAREM

At the UN in December 1953, President Dwight Eisenhower proposed that the atomic powers create a stock of fissile material for sanctioned, peaceful uses—a program known as Atoms for Peace. Eisenhower’s speech represented a major shift in US nuclear policy. Amendments to the McMahon Act—a 1946 law that placed the development of nuclear technologies under civilian control—permitted the AEC for the first time to transfer fissile materials to friendly states. In the years since the end of World War II, scientists had learned that uranium was more widespread than they had initially thought. Furthermore, chemical concentration techniques made exploitation of lower-grade deposits feasible—South Africa, for example, had started operation of the world’s first ion-exchange treatment plant in 1952—and increasingly capable rival atomic programs like France’s were emerging.

Under those circumstances, the US was creating a new strategy for nuclear raw materials. The postwar goal of securing the world’s uranium, or at least denying it to all others, was shifting. The US now sought to establish favorable exchanges that committed friendly countries to US technologies and peaceful uses. The US also had new goals in northwest Africa: Secure the Strategic Air Command air bases if possible, deny strategic resources to the USSR, and shift from protecting France’s stability and postcolonial ego to befriending newly independent non-European nations. Finding uranium in Morocco, in other words, became less and less of a priority.

In fact, it is questionable whether by the beginning of 1955 the French and American creators of SOMAREM really wanted to find uranium. The hurried character of SOMAREM’s last prospecting campaign suggests the allies were hoping to verify that easily mined uranium was not present in Morocco. Instructions for “detailed prospection campaigns in limited areas” gave way to “wide regional reconnaissance conducted both on the ground and in the air.” SOMAREM’s geologists detected “numerous zones of anomalies and several uranium occurrences in new regions and types of rocks”—but nothing they judged exploitable. ⁸

Meanwhile, violence in the protectorate peaked in the summer of 1955, when a brutal attack by nationalists on a colonial farming community at Oued Zem provoked an equally brutal military response. SOMAREM geologists were not immune to the spreading violence. One SOMAREM dispatch reported that “the incidents that occurred over the summer in different regions of Morocco led the USA Consul General to ask us to send back to Rabat two American geologists. . . . Three weeks later two French geologists were called back to the flag.” ⁹

US observers thought Morocco might descend into the sort of war that was engulfing its neighbor, Algeria—and that the result would ultimately be Moroccan independence. Given the new US goals in northwest Africa, SOMAREM was now more of a liability than an asset. Its management suspended activities. By the end of 1955, the French–US geological adventure was over. SOMAREM’s French and US geologists quietly departed Morocco for good; the enterprise sold off its workshops and laboratories and rented out its jeeps and Piper Super Cub.

Uranium’s symbolic and strategic value

The suspension of SOMAREM did not signal a loss of interest in African uranium. On the contrary, the US continued to collect uranium intelligence in the wider region of the western and southern Sahara. Meanwhile, the French had their own extensive explorations under way in northern and central Africa. They began with leads in the deserts of Algeria, then struck a significant supply in Gabon and an even bigger one the next decade in Niger—all facilitated by the airborne radiometric techniques first practiced by Foote at SOMAREM.

In November 1955 Mohammed V returned in triumph, and Morocco gained its independence. The question of how to continue the search for uranium in Morocco was now the kingdom’s. Ultimately, Morocco sought aid within the international frameworks stimulated by the US Atoms for Peace initiative. Between 1960 and 1985, eight technical assistance missions of the International Atomic Energy Agency supported Moroccan uranium prospection—often traversing the same grounds SOMAREM had covered and relying on SOMAREM’s field reports. But despite the many new techniques brought to bear, including helicopter-borne gamma-ray spectroscopy and geochemical fluorometry, the results were the same. Although many tantalizing occurrences of uranium appeared, the lethargic and sometimes erratic nature of the uranium market—in which future, optimistically projected values always outpace present, stagnant ones—meant there was no current economically viable framework in which Moroccan uranium could be exploited.

Nevertheless, Morocco absorbed a lesson. Not only might uranium’s economic value quickly rise if nuclear power booms, uranium exploration serves to assert sovereignty, markedly raising the mineral’s strategic value. In 1975 the kingdom made its own provocative move and sent thousands of subjects and soldiers streaming over its southern border into the Spanish territory of Western Sahara to claim it for Morocco. The region, an arena for guerrilla warfare and UN missions, is still under dispute. In the 21^st century, following airborne prospection reconnaissance campaigns, Morocco has attempted to lure foreign interests to prospect for uranium there to complement its vision of the geopolitically contested territory.

As we approach the 80th anniversary of the Einstein letter, that initial atomic-age epistle motivated by worry over uranium sources, the status of uranium has changed considerably. Through the labors of thousands of geologists, geophysicists, geochemists, mineralogists, metallurgists, prospectors, and diplomats around the world, scientists and atomic programs came to understand that an element once thought very rare is in fact widespread. Uranium is available in many forms in many locations around the globe, ready for mining and refining whenever a nuclear renaissance might appear on the horizon.

Morocco’s uranium deposits were ultimately deemed economically negligible—but uranium’s importance never was and never will be simply economic. The undercover intelligence-gathering and bilateral agreements that characterized the SOMAREM episode might be past, but uranium’s strategic and symbolic importance is still with us. Historian Gabrielle Hecht has noted the key role uranium played in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq—the danger of nuclear proliferation looming behind the invocation of “yellowcake from Niger.” ¹⁰ And anyone doubting the strategic importance of uranium need look no further than North Korea and Iran—two countries with domestic uranium resources at the ready. As for Morocco, its uranium ores still lie dormant, but their strategic value persists to this day.