Like all telephone calls to and from the Mossad chief, this one was automatically recorded. That member of the Israeli intelligence community would later claim the tape contained the following exchange:
Admoni: What is the name of this technician?
Maxwell: Vanunu. Mordechai Vanunu.
Admoni: Where is he now?
Maxwell: Sydney, Australia, I think.
Admoni: I will call you back.
Admoni’s first call was to Prime Minister Shimon Peres, who ordered every step be taken to “secure the situation.” With those words Peres authorized an operation that once more demonstrated the ruthless efficiency of Mossad.
Admoni’s staff quickly confirmed Vanunu had worked at Dimona from February 1977 until November 1986. He had been assigned to Machon-Two, one of the most secret of all the plant’s ten production units. The windowless concrete building externally resembled a warehouse. But its walls were thick enough to block the most powerful of satellite camera lenses from penetrating. Inside the bunkerlike structure, a system of false walls led to the elevators that descended through six levels to where the nuclear weapons were manufactured.
Vanunu’s security clearance was sufficient to gain unchallenged access to every corner of Machon-Two. His special security pass—number 520—coupled with his signature on an Israeli Official Secrets Acts document ensured no one ever challenged him as he went about his duties as a menahil, a controller on the night shift.
A stunned Admoni was told that almost certainly for some months, Vanunu somehow had secretly photographed the layout of Machon-Two: the control panels, the glove boxes, the nuclear bomb-building machinery. Evidence suggested he had stored his films in his clothes locker, and smuggled them out of what was supposedly the most secure place in Israel.
Admoni demanded to know how Vanunu had achieved all this—and perhaps more. Supposing he had already shown his material to the CIA? Or the Russians? The British or even the Chinese? The damage would be incalculable. Israel would be exposed as a liar before the world—a liar with the capability of destroying a very large part of it. Who was Vanunu? Whom could he be working for?
Answers were soon forthcoming. Vanunu was a Moroccan Jew, born on October 13, 1954, in Marrakech, where his parents were modest shopkeepers. In 1963, when anti-Semitism, never far from the surface in Morocco, spilled once more into open violence, the family emigrated to Israel, settling in the Negev Desert town of Beersheba.
Mordechai led an uneventful life as a teenager. Along with every other young person, when his time came he was conscripted into the Israeli army. He was already beginning to lose his hair, making him appear older than his nineteen years. He reached the rank of first sergeant in a minesweeping unit stationed on the Golan Heights. After military service he entered Ramat Aviv University in Tel Aviv. Having failed two exams at the end of his first year in a physics-degree course, he left the campus.
In the summer of 1976 he replied to an advertisement for trainee technicians to work at Dimona. After a lengthy interview with the plant’s security officer he was accepted for training and sent on an intensive course in physics, chemistry, math, and English. He did sufficiently well to finally enter Dimona as a technician in February 1977.
Vanunu had been made redundant in November 1986. In his security file at Dimona it was noted that he had displayed “left-wing and pro-Arab beliefs.” Vanunu left Israel for Australia, arriving in Sydney in May of the following year. Somewhere along his journey, which had followed a well-trodden path by young Israelis through the Far East, Vanunu had renounced his once-strong Jewish faith to become a Christian. The picture emerging from a dozen sources for Admoni to consider was of a physically unprepossessing young man who appeared to be the classic loner: he had made no real friends at Dimona; he had no girlfriends; he spent his time at home reading books on philosophy and politics. Mossad psychologists told Admoni a man like that could be foolhardy, with a warped sense of values and often disillusioned. That kind of personality could be dangerously unpredictable.
In Australia Vanunu had met Oscar Guerrero, a Colombian journalist working in Sydney, while he was painting a church. Soon the garrulous journalist had concocted a bizarre story with which to regale his friends in the raffish King’s Cross quarter of Sydney. He claimed he had helped a top Israeli nuclear scientist to defect with details of Israel’s plans to nuke its Arab neighbors and that, one step ahead of Mossad, the scientist was now hiding out in a safe house in a city suburb while Guerrero masterminded what he called “the sale of the scoop of the century.”
Vanunu was irritated by such nonsensical claims. Now a committed pacifist, he wanted his story to appear in a serious publication to alert the world to the threat he perceived Israel now posed with its nuclear capability. However, Guerrero had already contacted the Madrid office of the Sunday Times, and the London newspaper with a fearless reputation sent a reporter to Sydney to interview Vanunu.
Guerrero’s fantasies were swiftly exposed under questioning. The Colombian began to feel he was about to lose control over Vanunu’s story. His fears increased when the Sunday Times reporter said he would fly Vanunu to London, where his claims could be more fully investigated. The newspaper planned to have the technician questioned by one of Britain’s leading nuclear scientists.
Guerrero watched Vanunu and his traveling companion board the flight to London, his misgivings deepening by the minute. He needed advice on how to handle the situation. The only person he could think of was a former member of the Australian Security and Intelligence Service (ASIS). Guerrero told him he had been cheated out of a world-shaking story, and described exactly what Vanunu had smuggled out of Dimona—sixty photographs taken inside Machon-Two, together with maps and drawings. They revealed beyond a doubt that Israel was the sixth most powerful nuclear nation in the world.
Once more Guerrero’s luck ran out. He had chosen the wrong man to call. The former ASIS operative contacted his old employer and repeated what Guerrero had told him. There was a close working relationship between Mossad and ASIS. The former provided intelligence on Arab terrorist movements out of the Middle East to the Pacific. ASIS informed the katsa attached to the Israeli embassy in Canberra of the call from its former employee. The information was immediately faxed to Admoni. By then more disturbing news had reached him. On his backpacking trip to Australia, Vanunu had stopped over in Nepal and had visited the Soviet embassy in Kathmandu. Had he gone there to show his evidence to Moscow?
It took a Mossad sayan on the staff of the king of Nepal three days to discover that Vanunu’s sole purpose in going to the embassy was to enquire about the travel documents he would need to take a vacation in the Soviet Union at some unspecified later date. He had been sent on his way with a pile of brochures.
In the hours that had passed since Vanunu was being flown to London by the Sunday Times, Guerrero had tried to make a quick killing—by offering copies of Vanunu’s documentation to two Australian newspapers. They had dismissed the material as forgeries.
Growing desperate, Guerrero had set off to London in pursuit of Vanunu. Unable to find him, Guerrero had taken the documents to the Sunday Mirror. Included was a photograph of Vanunu taken in Australia. Within hours Nicholas Davies knew they were there. He promptly told Maxwell. The publisher called Admoni. Several hours later, when the Mossad chief again called Maxwell, Admoni received another jolt. The Sunday Times was taking Vanunu’s story seriously. It was therefore critically important to know what the technician had photographed. It was hoped a damage-limitation response could then be fashioned. The reports from Canberra suggested that Guerrero was clearly motivated by money. If Vanunu was shown to have a similar aspiration, then it might be possible to mount a successful disinformation campaign that the Sunday Times had been swindled by two con men.
Once more the indefatigable Ari Ben-Menashe was pressed into service. Admoni ordered him to fly to London to obtain the copies that Guerrero had shown to the Sunday Mirror. Ben-Menashe would la
ter recall to the veteran American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh:
“Nicholas Davies had arranged for Guerrero to meet this ‘hot’ American journalist—me. At the meeting, Guerrero, eager for another sale, displayed some of Vanunu’s color photographs. I had no idea if they were significant. They needed to be seen by experts in Israel. I told Guerrero I needed copies. He balked. I said I had to know if they were real if he wanted money and that Nick would vouch for me.”
Guerrero handed over several photographs to Ben-Menashe. They were couriered to Tel Aviv.
Their arrival created further consternation. Officials from Dimona identified Machon-Two from the photographs. One of the prints showed the area where nuclear land mines had been manufactured before being sown along the Golan Heights border with Syria. There was no longer any question of being able to destroy Vanunu’s credibility. Every nuclear physicist would recognize what the equipment was for.
Prime Minister Peres set up a crisis team to monitor the situation. Some of Mossad’s department heads urged that a kidon squad should be sent to London to hunt down Vanunu and kill him. Admoni rejected the idea. The Sunday Times would not have the space to publish everything Vanunu told the newspaper; it would require a full-length book to contain all the information to which the technician would have had access. But once the newspaper had finished with Vanunu, the likeliest possibility was he would then be debriefed by MI6 and the CIA, and Israel would face even more problems. It was all the more imperative to learn how Vanunu had carried out his spying activities in Dimona and whether he had worked alone or with others—and if so, whom they were working for. The only way to discover all this was to bring Vanunu back to Israel to be interrogated.
Admoni needed a way to flush the technician out of wherever the Sunday Times had hidden him. In the open it would be easier to deal with Vanunu, and in the end, if he had to be killed, it would not be the first time Mossad had committed murder on the streets of London. In the hunt for the perpetrators of the massacre of the Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, Mossad had killed one of the Black September group in a carefully staged hit-and-run road accident as he walked back to his Bloomsbury hotel.
In London, the Sunday Times, realizing Israel would do everything possible to discredit Vanunu, had arranged for him to be questioned by Dr. Frank Barnaby, a nuclear physicist with impeccable credentials who had worked at Britain’s nuclear weapons installation at Aldermaston. He concluded that the photographs and documentation were authentic and the technician’s detailed recall was accurate.
The Sunday Times then took a fateful step. Its reporter presented the Israeli embassy in London with a summary of all that Vanunu had revealed to them, along with photostats of his passport and the photographs, together with Barnaby’s assessment. The intention was to force an admission from the Israeli government. Instead, the embassy dismissed the material as “having no base whatsoever in reality.”
In Tel Aviv the photocopies presented to the embassy caused further consternation. For Ben-Menashe:
“The cat was out of the bag. I was still in London when Davies said Maxwell wanted to see me. We met in the same office where I had agreed to pay him $8 million commission for hiding our money behind the Iron Curtain. Maxwell made it clear he understood what was to be done about the Vanunu story. He said he had already spoken to my boss in Tel Aviv.”
As a result of that call, Admoni had finally come up with a way to drive Vanunu into the open.
The next issue of the Sunday Mirror contained a large photograph of Mordechai Vanunu, together with a story holding the technician and Oscar Guerrero up to ridicule, calling the Colombian a liar and a cheat, and the claim about Israel’s nuclear capability a hoax. The report had been dictated by Maxwell who had also supervised the prominent positioning of Vanunu’s photograph. The first shot had been fired in a major disinformation campaign orchestrated by Mossad’s psychological warfare department.
After reading it, Vanunu became agitated to the point where he told his Sunday Times “minders”—the reporters who had watched over him since he had been brought to London—that he “wanted to disappear. I don’t want anyone to know where I am.”
The panic-stricken technician was staying at the latest hotel his minders had chosen, the Mountbatten near Shaftesbury Avenue in Central London.
Following the Sunday Mirror publication, sayanim in London were mobilized to find him. Scores of trusted Jewish volunteers had each been given lists of hotels and boarding houses to check. In each call they gave a description of Vanunu from the photograph published in the Sunday Mirror, each caller claiming to be a relative checking to see if he had registered.
On Wednesday, September 25, Admoni received news from London that Vanunu had been located. It was time to bring into play the next stage of his plan.
The link between intelligence work and sexual entrapment was as old as spying itself. In the fourth book of Moses, Rahab, a prostitute, saves the lives of two of Joshua’s spies from the king of Jericho’s counterintelligence people—the first recorded meeting between the world’s two oldest professions. One of Rahab’s heirs in the love-and-espionage business was Mata Hari, a Dutch seductress who worked for the Germans in World War I and was executed by the French. From the beginning Mossad had recognized the value of sexual entrapment. For Meir Amit:
“It was another weapon. A woman has skills a man simply does not. She knows how to listen. Pillow talk is not a problem for her. The history of modern intelligence is filled with accounts of women who have used their sex for the good of their country. To say that Israel has not done the same would be foolish. But our women are volunteers, high-minded women who know the risks involved. That takes a special kind of courage. It is not so much a question of sleeping with someone. It is to lead a man to believe you will do so in return for what he has to tell you. That does not begin to describe the great skills that are called into play to achieve that.”
Nahum Admoni had handpicked an agent who possessed all those qualities to entice Mordechai Vanunu into Mossad’s hands.
Cheryl Ben-Tov was a bat leveyha, one grade below a katsa. Born into a wealthy Jewish family in Orlando, Florida, she had seen her parents’ marriage end in a bitterly contested divorce. She found solace in religious studies, which led to her spending three months on a kibbutz in Israel. There she became immersed in Jewish history and the Hebrew language. She decided to remain in Israel. At the age of eighteen she met and fell in love with a Sabra, a native-born Israeli, called Ofer Ben-Tov. He worked for Aman as an analyst. A year after they met the couple were married.
Among the wedding guests were several high-ranking members of the Israeli intelligence community, including one from Meluckha, Mossad’s recruiting department. During the marriage feast he asked Cheryl the sort of questions any bride might expect. Was she going to go on working? Have a family at once? Caught up in the excitement of the celebrations, Cheryl had said her only plan was to try to find a way to give something back to her country, which had given her so much, referring to Israel as “family.” A month after she returned from her honeymoon, she received a call from the wedding guest: he said he had been thinking over what they had spoken about and maybe there was a way for her to help.
They arranged to meet at a café in downtown Tel Aviv. He astonished her by citing with complete accuracy her school grades, her family history, how she had met her husband. Perhaps sensing her anger at having her privacy invaded, he explained that all the information was in her husband’s file at Aman.
The recruiter understood that the relationship between himself and a potential recruit could often be tricky; it has been likened to a warlock initiating a neophyte into a secret sect with its special signs, incantations, and rites: it is the fellowship of Orpheus without a love of music. After telling Cheryl for whom he worked, the man delivered a set piece. Mossad was always on the lookout for people who wanted to serve their country. At the wedding she had compared Israel to a family. Well, Moss
ad was like that. Once you were accepted, you were part of its family, protected and nurtured. In return you served the family in any way asked of you. Was she interested?
Cheryl was. She was told she would have to undergo preliminary tests. During the next three months she took a number of written and oral examinations in various safe houses around Tel Aviv. Her high IQ—she consistently registered 140 in these tests—American background, general knowledge, and social skills made her an above-average recruit.
She was told she was suitable for training.
Before that, she had a further session with her recruiter. He told her she was about to enter a world in which she could share her experiences with no one, not even her husband. In such a lonely place, she would feel vulnerable to the corrupting lure of trust. But she must trust no one except her colleagues. She would be tutored in deceit, taught to use methods that violated every sense of decency and honor; she must accept new ways of doing things. She would find some of the acts she would be asked to perform highly unpleasant, but she must always put them in the context of the mission she was on.
The recruiter leaned across the table in the interview room and said there was still time for her to change her mind. There would be no recriminations; there should be no sense of failure on her part.
Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad Page 22