Spies Against Armageddon

by Dan Raviv

  That was the end of the trip. The angry Pakistanis could have detained the Israelis as spies, but instead decided to expel them on the first flight the next day. The business delegates were also unhappy because the Mossad had ruined their chance of getting a nice contract. The whole trip now seemed devised as a cover for an intelligence operation, and they felt like extras in a scenario staged by the Mossad from the outset.

  Some of the participants claimed later that if they had been able to make their deal, they might have influenced the Pakistanis to break off their dangerous liaisons with Iran and Libya.

  Yet, the overall Israeli intelligence assessment was that A.Q. Khan would never have agreed to be restrained. He was determined to spread nuclear knowhow and profit from it. In the 1990s he traveled through the Middle East, offering his services to various countries. Most governments declined to hire him, but Libya and Iran signed lucrative contracts with him. That was enough for Khan to gain the reputation of being the world’s greatest nuclear proliferator.

  The Mossad made sure to track Khan’s travels. “We knew about his movements, but the larger picture escaped us. We didn’t realize how bold, daring, and greedy he would be. He’s one of the rare examples of a single person determining the course of history,” Shabtai Shavit, who was then the director of the agency, admitted years later.

  “So we didn’t attach too much importance to his meetings and offerings. I regret that we didn’t assassinate him. That could have saved Israel a lot of worries.”

  While doing all it could to preserve its nuclear monopoly, Israeli intelligence also continued its policy of nuclear ambiguity.

  The notion of ambiguity was first conjured up by Peres’s delicate dance of words in 1963, when he was chatting with President John Kennedy at the White House. Israel would “not be the first to introduce” nuclear weapons into the Middle East, Peres had told the president. That almost immediately became Israel’s policy.

  It was a unique choice for a nation with nuclear weapons. Israel would always refuse stubbornly to confirm that it had—or did not have—a nuclear arsenal, though the whole world believed that it did. Officials and the military censor enforced an almost ridiculous policy: turning Dimona and everything about it into a taboo. The Israeli media and the public were not allowed, for years, even to discuss the ramifications of having a nuclear option.

  One nuclear technician threatened to jeopardize the decades-old policy, and he made a mockery of the enormous security around it.

  Mordecai Vanunu, a Moroccan-born Jew who immigrated with his parents to Israel in the 1950s thanks to secret efforts by Israeli intelligence, developed strong but mercurial opinions and behavior.

  First, as was traditional in his community, he studied at a religious school. Later, he stopped wearing a yarmulke (kippa is the Hebrew term) on his head, and he was open to the temptations of the secular world. Throughout, he felt that as a Sephardic (Eastern) Jew he was rejected by what he saw as the dominant Ashkenazic (European) culture in Israel.

  In 1977, at age 22, while studying at the local university of the desert town Beersheba, he applied for a job at the Dimona nuclear reactor, administered by the Israel Atomic Energy Commission. After passing the exam, he underwent a short course in nuclear physics and chemistry, including lessons on plutonium and uranium with which the new recruits would be working.

  Vanunu started working as a technician on the night shift. The routine was boring, and he compensated for that by plunging into the bustling life of the university by day. He volunteered to pose as a nude model for art classes, and he also shifted his political views from right-wing Likud politics to left-wing radicalism.

  His newly adopted ideology was deepened by the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. His extracurricular behavior was noticed by the university’s chief security officer. Israel being a small society with a shared sense of mission, security officers around the country tend to work closely together. Even at an academic institution, they feel obliged to cooperate with the government’s security apparatus.

  The university security officer told his counterpart at Dimona about Vanunu’s activities. The man at Dimona reported to Malmab—the Defense Ministry’s security office in charge of enforcing the ambiguity policy and protecting all defense-based scientific institutions. Those included the Dimona reactor and the biological institute at Nes Tziona.

  The counter-espionage department of Shin Bet was also brought into the picture, and the authorities together decided that it would be best to put pressure on Vanunu to leave. They warned him about his political and personal behavior.

  Vanunu only became more defiant. For reasons he never explained, he started wandering around the Dimona facility’s secret corridors, taking photographs with a camera that he smuggled in.

  That was a clear security breach, and he should have been spotted in the heavily guarded facility. But officials never knew that Vanunu had snapped photos.

  The security chiefs did find an excuse to fire him in November 1985, when there were some budget cuts at the atomic energy commission. Vanunu complained that he was a victim of both political and ethnic discrimination, but he left Dimona.

  He still had his rolls of film, however, and when he left the country soon after losing his job, he felt fed up with Judaism and the Jewish state.

  Allowing him to leave Israel so easily was yet another in a string of failures by Malmab and Shin Bet. Israelis with classified jobs frequently are visited and reminded of security requirements before they go on foreign trips. Vanunu was overlooked and his actions neglected.

  Vanunu was in a soul-searching mood. His first destination was in the Far East, where he explored alternative religions. He went on to Sydney, Australia, in May 1986, and found a job at an Anglican church. And he found the light.

  The wayward Israeli became friends with the priest and converted to Christianity. He also met Oscar Guerrero, a Colombian vagabond with no fixed address and no fixed profession. Vanunu confided in him that he had worked at Israel’s top-secret reactor and had two interesting rolls of color film with him.

  The Colombian, a highly entrepreneurial traveler, marveled at Vanunu as a chicken about to lay golden eggs. He persuaded the Israeli that the story could be sold, and for enough money to last a lifetime. The idea appealed to Vanunu.

  Guerrero appointed himself Vanunu’s literary agent, in effect. They developed the snapshots, and Guerrero contacted several international publications to offer a “sensational scoop.” Strangely, no one was interested except for the British Sunday Times. The free-spending newspaper, owned by the Australian-born press magnate Rupert Murdoch, sent an investigative reporter to Sydney to meet the Israeli and assess his fantastic tale.

  The reporter was impressed, and a deal was struck. Vanunu provided the photos and was flown to London in September 1986 for further debriefings. The Sunday Times cut out the middleman, refusing to deal with Guerrero.

  In London, Vanunu was taken care of by Insight, the investigative team of the Sunday Times, which placed him in a nice hotel and promised him a book deal, with an advance of roughly $300,000 if his story could be verified. Assisted by nuclear scientists, the journalists started to grill Vanunu. He told them everything he knew, which included a lot that he never should have known if security at Dimona had been conducted properly.

  He provided a detailed sketch of six hitherto unknown, below-ground-level sections of the Dimona complex. That could explain why the American inspectors in the 1960s inside Dimona never saw the truly important parts. Above ground, the building appeared to be a two-story, little-used unimportant warehouse.

  Scientists corroborated Vanunu’s story, and the Sunday Times was preparing to publish one of the world’s great exclusives: an accurate and detailed look inside Israel’s secret nuclear bomb factory.

  Near the end of September, the British newspaper sought a comment from the Israeli embassy in London by giving it an outline of the Vanunu story. The embassy issued a denial and portr
ayed Vanunu as a minor technician who would not know anything, anyway.

  What later tipped the balance in favor of publishing the story was the somewhat panicked reaction by Peres, now the prime minister. He summoned a group of Israeli newspaper editors and briefed them, off the record, about the coming big story from London. Peres begged them to play it down.

  As is perversely customary with off-the-record briefings in Israel, the information was quickly leaked.

  The Sunday Times realized that despite the embassy’s denial, Israel’s most senior authorities were taking the Vanunu story very seriously.

  In the meantime, angry at both Vanunu and the Sunday Times for abandoning him, Guerrero went to a rival newspaper—the Sunday Mirror—with his own, slightly garbled version of the nuclear revelations. The Mirror did not believe in the Colombian at all, but paid him some money and used a couple of Vanunu’s photos to publish a two-page barb that poked fun at the Sunday Times for falling for patent nonsense.

  Israel’s nuclear potential was being used as a weapon in a newspaper circulation war that raged between Murdoch and his arch-rival, Mirror owner Robert Maxwell. Maxwell, a Czech-born Jew who converted to Christianity, had become a born-again pro-Israel activist. After he mysteriously fell off his yacht and drowned in the Mediterranean in 1991, published rumors would claim that he was a Mossad agent who in 1986 provided a tip-off about Vanunu. Some books suggested that the Mossad sent frogmen to murder their sayan, or helper, to shut him up. Those tales made little sense.

  Moreover, the Mossad did not need Maxwell to know about Vanunu and his escapades. The agency learned about it from the Sunday Times reporters. At least twice, they contacted Israel for comment and verification: once, calling the embassy, and even earlier calling a journalist in Israel to ask about Vanunu’s credibility. The journalist thought he should inform his brother, who happened to be a senior Aman officer. Now the intelligence community knew.

  Prime Minister Peres ordered the Mossad to find the former nuclear worker and bring him back to Israel. At Mossad headquarters, some senior members suggested that the best solution would be to assassinate Vanunu. But that was ruled out. Since the death of the kidnapped Alexander Ibor in 1954, no Israeli citizen was killed by his own government.

  The Mossad had to come up with a snatch mission to bring Vanunu home to face trial for spilling secrets.

  One more string was attached: Peres ordered that the kidnapping not take place on British soil. He feared that whether it was a success or a failure, Britain’s Iron Lady—Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher—would be very angry at Israel if her nation’s sovereignty were violated.

  Caesarea operatives—closely supervised by the department head, Shabtai Shavit—stepped up efforts to find Vanunu in Britain. They flew in, using false passports and armed with cover stories. Shavit’s deputy was the on-the-spot project manager in London.

  It would not be easy, with Vanunu changing hotels regularly. The Mossad manhunt benefited from the pure luck of a labor strike against the Times. There were picket lines outside the newspaper’s offices, which provided a perfect cover for a Mossad team to pose as a television news crew, hoping to spot Vanunu and his minders from the Insight team as they came and went.

  That worked. And from then on, it was relatively easy to keep an eye on Vanunu. Still, they faced two problems: how to establish contact with him, and how to compel him to leave Britain so that Peres’s orders could be obeyed.

  Good luck stroked their mission again. Vanunu was angry, by now, about the delays in publishing his story. He told his handlers from the Sunday Times that he would love some female companionship. The newspaper team would say later that it did not arrange for a prostitute, out of fear that eventually that would make them look like pimps.

  Frustrated and lonely, Vanunu became careless about his security, and the Sunday Times handlers could not hold him back. He started wandering the streets of London alone, and one evening eye contact was made.

  Vanunu saw a woman who seemed interested in him. She was plump and bleached-blonde, wearing high heels and playing hard to get. She introduced herself as “Cindy,” but years later her true identity would be revealed by the Sunday Times: Cheryl Bar-Hanin, an American Jew who moved to Israel, married an intelligence officer, and was recruited to work for Caesarea.

  Mordecai and “Cindy” went out on a few dates over the next week. The Mossad was exploiting his sexual hunger and his frustration with the British press. Cindy then suggested a way to get away from it all. She said that her sister had an apartment in Rome, and that they should fly there for a memorable weekend.

  Against the advice of his Sunday Times babysitters, Vanunu took the bait. After hearing about the girlfriend, the British reporters cautioned him not to leave the country. But he did leave.

  After landing in Rome, he drove with Cindy to what he assumed would be their love nest. It was a Mossad honey trap. Kidon team members were waiting for him in the apartment. They pounced on Vanunu, injected him with a sedative, put him in a rental car, drove to a marina 200 miles from Rome, and boarded a yacht. It pulled out and rendezvoused with an Israeli Navy ship, the Noga, which had cadets on board on a training mission.

  The cadets and the crew were told to go below deck—and not look—when the strangers arrived. The Kidon team members, carrying their sedated prisoner, locked themselves inside a cabin, and the ship sailed to Israel.

  While Vanunu was a captive in chains in the eastern Mediterranean, the Sunday Times finally published its major spread—with a front-page headline screaming, “REVEALED: THE SECRETS OF ISRAEL’S NUCLEAR ARSENAL.” It included Vanunu’s inside story of the work conducted at Dimona, and a physicist’s assessment that Israel must have around 200 nuclear and thermonuclear bombs.

  The world was not really surprised. It always assumed that Israel had a substantial atomic arsenal. Yet, it was fascinating to see Vanunu’s photographs.

  Several governments deplored his having been kidnapped in Italy’s capital, but officials also admired Israel’s decisive action: bringing a citizen home to face trial for violating the law by revealing sensitive secrets. Vanunu had revealed them only to a newspaper, not directly to an enemy. Still, he was indicted for espionage and treason.

  Israel’s supreme court rejected a claim by Vanunu’s lawyer that the former Dimona worker had been brought illegally to the country. Vanunu was sentenced to 18 years in prison, and he served the entire term. Israeli officials were not even tempted to grant leniency to the nuclear spy, even though prison officials reported that he was almost losing his sanity in a long period of solitary confinement.

  That harsh attitude was the product of Yehiel Horev’s pressure. The Malmab chief would not forgive or forget the Israeli who betrayed one of Israel’s sacred secrets.

  There certainly was an element of revenge, but also a measure of face-saving. Security chiefs were ashamed of their initial failures to stop Vanunu, and they compensated for their own shortcomings by taking it out on him.

  The vendetta against him continued, even after he served his term. He was released in 2004, yet Shin Bet and Malmab claimed that he continued to be a security risk because of the knowledge in his head. Thus, they insisted that he be banned from leaving Israel, and his movements were restricted.

  Even in 2012, Vanunu could occasionally be spotted strolling the streets of Tel Aviv or sipping coffee at an outdoor table –almost always alone. He certainly had friends worldwide, and even a couple in America that formally adopted him, but his quest had been a lonely one: trying to force his country to tell the truth about its own strength.

  Israel’s leaders still preferred ambiguity and showed they would take action to preserve it.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Spying on Friends

  Inside CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia—in a corridor leading to the toilets, in a segregated section where foreign visitors come on official business—hung a large poster showing a notorious spy.

  It was a ph
oto of Jonathan Jay Pollard, an American who in 1985 was caught spying for Israel. The poster’s implicit message to employees of the United States intelligence community was: Don’t do what he did, and you won’t end up like him. Pollard is serving a life sentence in prison.

  When Mossad liaisons were the visitors, the poster conveyed an extra meaning. It was a bitter reminder of the difficulties the organization has had in dealing with the CIA, and more widely with the entire U.S. military and security establishment.

  “Those were harsh times for us,” said a former Mossad head of station in Washington, referring to the Pollard fall-out. “There was a decade in which we were punished for a crime we did not commit.”

  He said he was reminded of the Biblical phrase about the sins of the father being visited upon the children. The Mossad visitors felt they should not be punished by the Americans for something that other Israelis had done; indeed, the CIA acknowledged that it was not the Mossad, but another unit, that ran Pollard. Still, it added up to Israel betraying the United States.

  The secret operation unraveled on November 21, 1985, when Pollard sat nervously in his Ford Mustang just outside the front gate of the Israeli embassy in Washington. With him were his wife, Anne Henderson-Pollard, their birth certificates, family photographs, their cat, and the cat’s vaccination records. The Pollards were hoping to flee the country right then and there, if possible simply by vanishing into the world of diplomatic immunity.

  When the heavy steel doors opened for a few moments, Pollard gunned the engine and pulled into the Israeli compound. Security guards looked puzzled and drew their guns, even as the driver told them that he needed help—refuge from the FBI agents following him.

  Indeed, several carloads of FBI agents lurked outside the gate, and they used an intercom placed there for visitors to tell the Israeli guards that the people who had just driven inside were wanted for questioning. The embassy’s administrator and chief security officer turned away the Pollards. They were forced to leave, and the FBI arrested them outside the grounds.