Uranium Unlimited?

Uranium Unlimited

As a perfect spot for retirement, 61-year-old Donald M. Nelson las fall bought a French provincial mansion on a mountaintop overlooking California's San Fernando Valley. But retirement was too dull for the onetime head of the War Production Board. Last week Nelson came down from his mountain to become president, treasurer and a director of Colorado's Consolidated Caribou Silver Mines, Inc. In with him as vice president went Richard J. Reynolds, son of the late tobacco tycoon; and as director, Joseph B. Keenan, ex-Assistant U.S. Attorney General and prosecutor in the Tokyo war criminal trials.

But the Messrs. Nelson, Reynolds and Keenan were not solely interested in silver; they hoped that their mine contained uranium. If it does, Nelson thought that it was his job as a public duty to get the uranium out.

Old Hand. But the job didn't seem a public service to the New York Journal-American's Financial Editor Leslie Gould. He hinted that Nelson's name was being used to help sell 800,000 shares of Caribou common stock at $1.25 a share, which was, he thought, "not the kind of stock to be sold to the public." The real powers behind the scene, wrote Columnist Gould, are two Russian-born brothers named Alexander and Boris Pregel, who "are listed as owning 321,000 common . . . costing them $5,350 or an average of 1 1/2-c- a share. At the $1.25 price to the public, their $5,350 'investment' is worth $401,250."

Who are the Pregels? No shadow men, they run Manhattan's Canadian Radium & Uranium Corp. Contrary to Gould, they said that they had invested $145,000 in reopening Caribou (which had been abandoned in the late '20s), after they found uranium-bearing pitchblende in the tailings of the mine. During World War II, Boris Pregel, 57, was general agent for Canada's Eldorado Mining & Refining Co., which supplied the Manhattan Project with nearly all the uranium mined on the North American continent.

By his own admission a talented man (he speaks four languages, writes music and sings), Boris Pregel has a special talent for bad publicity. In 1946, the New York Journal-American disclosed the sale of 500 Ibs. of uranium oxide to the Soviet Union during the war, and later identified Pregel as the salesman. Although the U.S. Government had authorized the sale, the incident has haunted Pregel ever since, most recently in the Racey Jordan "revelations" to a Congressional committee (TIME, Dec. 12 & 19).

New Head. To clear things up, Pregel hired Manhattan's famed private detective Raymond Schindler to investigate him. Schindler found "there wasn't a blotch on him," but suggested that the Pregels might save themselves some trouble by turning over the management of the company to someone like Nelson. Nelson agreed to take over, provided the Pregels gave him voting control of their stock for two years.

But Caribou will have to produce more than a new president to convince Colorado mining men that the mine contains much uranium. After it was highly touted by Look magazine in 1948 as giving the U.S. "enough high-grade uranium for self-sufficiency in the atomic age," AEC Chairman David E. Lilienthal branded claims like Caribou's as "tragically untrue."

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