Israel's Whistleblower: the Man the Mossad Kidnapped in Rome

Over the past few weeks, the United States and Israel have bombed nuclear sites and cities across Iran. The official justification is that Tehran was secretly developing a nuclear program, in violation of international law and non-proliferation norms. Much of the Western world has accepted, or at least tolerated, this position. And yet there is another state that possesses nuclear weapons with no international constraints, having refused for decades to sign the very same Non-Proliferation Treaty invoked today to justify bombing Iran. That state is Israel.

If we know this for certain, it is thanks to a man who in 1986 proved it, with photographic evidence, that Israel holds a nuclear arsenal of one hundred, perhaps two hundred warheads, and has been running the same kind of program for which it now bombs Iran. The whistleblower who revealed this fact paid with eighteen years in prison, eleven of them in total isolation. And it's still not over. To capture him, the Mossad built an elaborate undercover operation to lure him into a trap in Rome. That whistleblower's name is Mordechai Vanunu. And this is his story.

This issue is written by Luigi and edited by Sacha.

The Man Who Photographed the Bomb

London, September 10, 1986. In a Sunday Times office in Wapping, east London, a thirty-one-year-old man pulls a camera roll out of his bag. Inside are roughly sixty photographs he should never have been able to take. The photos show the control panel of a secret plutonium separation facility, located in an underground structure, six floors below the Negev desert in southern Israel. He took them with a Pentax he carried in his backpack every day, because after almost ten years working there he had become a familiar face to other plant operators, and nobody searched him anymore.

The Sunday Times journalist he is meeting, Peter Hounam, calls in two nuclear experts. The conclusion is unanimous: Israel does not have the ten or twenty primitive devices that had been assumed. It has between one hundred and two hundred warheads. Some of thermonuclear type. The Dimona reactor, ostensibly a simple research facility capable of producing around 25 megawatts, is in fact operating at far higher outputs, between 70 and 150 megawatts, effectively a factory for producing nuclear weapons.

To grasp the full weight of that revelation, you need to understand the context. Since 1969, Tel Aviv had officially maintained what is known as nuclear ambiguity, that is, it neither confirmed nor denied possessing nuclear weapons. This position had been formalized in 1969 through a secret agreement between President Nixon and Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir. The United States would turn a blind eye to the program as long as Israel didn't make any false moves.

Mordechai Vanunu knew that story from the inside. Born in Marrakesh in 1954, he had immigrated to Israel as a child with his family, growing up in the southern city of Beersheba under difficult circumstances, and had found work at the Negev Nuclear Research Center. He was assigned to Machon 2, the site's most secretive unit: an underground bunker where plutonium was separated, processed, and turned into components for weapons. Even though, officially, that site did not exist.

Over those years, Vanunu also began studying philosophy at Ben-Gurion University. He grew closer to the Palestinian cause. He opposed the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. Notes appeared in his internal security file describing him as having "left-wing and pro-Arab sympathies." In May 1984 he received a formal warning, and in November 1985 he was laid off along with one hundred and eighty other workers as part of a workforce reduction.

Before leaving, Vanunu made sure he had evidence to back what he intended to expose. He took those photographs and then left Israel, traveled across Asia, and ended up in Australia. In Sydney, he converted to Anglican Christianity. From there, he managed to make contact with Peter Hounam at the Sunday Times and decided that the world had a right to know. On October 5, 1986, the Sunday Times published Revealed: The Secrets of Israel's Nuclear Arsenal. Israel did not take it well.

Mordechai's Terrible Roman Holiday

What happened in the weeks leading up to publication is a textbook intelligence operation. Even before Vanunu managed to get his leak published, there was already someone who knew everything that was about to happen. When Vanunu arrived in Australia, he turned to Oscar Guerrero, a Colombian photographer who presented himself as a freelance journalist and offered to act as an intermediary with the international press. Vanunu handed him part of the photographic material. That's how Vanunu made contact with the Sunday Times, which initiated independent verification with nuclear experts, and which led to the investigation the world now knows. So far, so good.

The problem was that Guerrero had, in the meantime, also sold the same photographs to the Sunday Mirror, likely to pocket a second commission. The owner of the Sunday Mirror was Robert Maxwell, the British media magnate, father of Ghislaine Maxwell, whose personal history was interwoven with Israel going back to the 1948 War of Independence. According to Israeli intelligence sources, it was Maxwell himself who tipped off the Israeli embassy that the nuclear story was about to break. That was the signal that triggered the capture operation.

The Israeli government under Peres had a serious problem on its hands. Vanunu was in London. Acting against him on British soil would have created a diplomatic incident with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, with whom Peres maintained a personal relationship. He had to be moved elsewhere. Mossad psychologists analyzed Vanunu's profile and identified a vulnerability: he was lonely and seeking female company.

They selected an agent whose real name was Cheryl Bentov, an American-born woman recruited by the Mossad after Israeli military service. Cheryl became "Cindy," a naive American tourist. She met Vanunu in London. They visited museums, went to the cinema, and had coffee together. They saw each other several evenings, going out on dates. Then Cindy suggested a trip to Rome. Her sister, she said, had an apartment in the city.

On September 30, 1986, six days before the Sunday Times published its investigation, Vanunu and Bentov landed in Rome. As soon as Vanunu walked into the apartment, three Mossad agents pinned him down. They handcuffed him, injected him with a sedative, and loaded him into a van, from there onto a motorboat, and then onto the INS Noga, an Israeli military vessel disguised as a merchant ship, diverted from its normal route to wait off the coast of La Spezia.

On November 9, 1986, the Israeli government officially confirmed it was holding him. Vanunu was barred from communicating with the media. But during a transfer to the Jerusalem courthouse, he wrote a message on the palm of his left hand and pressed it against the armored window as photographers shot from outside: "Vanunu M was hijacked in Rome ITL 30.9.86 21:00. Came to Rome by fly BA504." It is a gesture that would go down in the history of journalism and intelligence.

The Price of Truth

The trial was held entirely behind closed doors. In March 1988, Vanunu was sentenced to eighteen years for treason and espionage. The transcripts remained classified for over a decade. Of those eighteen years, more than eleven were spent in complete solitary confinement, in a cell measuring two by three meters, a condition not mandated by the sentence but renewed year after year as an autonomous administrative measure. Amnesty International declared him a prisoner of conscience. Daniel Ellsberg, the Vietnam-era whistleblower who revealed the Pentagon Papers, called him "the preeminent hero of the nuclear era." In 1987, he received the Right Livelihood Award, the so-called Alternative Nobel. He was released on April 21, 2004, after serving his full sentence. At the improvised press conference outside the prison, he refused to speak Hebrew. He addressed the journalists in English: "You have not succeeded in breaking me, you have not succeeded in making me crazy."

But from that moment on, the Israeli government imposed restrictions of every kind: a ban on leaving Israel, on contacting foreign nationals, on speaking about the Dimona nuclear program, his arrest in Rome, or the trial. Amnesty International has declared that the restrictions violate the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which Israel has ratified. In his most recent public statement, Vanunu said his restrictions have been renewed.

Until the next Debrief,

Luigi and Sacha

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