The scientist kidnapped and jailed for 18 years for revealing nuclear secrets
The scientist who exposed Israel’s nuclear secrets is still banned from leaving the country or speaking to foreigners nearly 40 years since he was kidnapped by Mossad.
Since the 1960s, Israel was suspected of having nuclear weapons, something it refuses to admit or deny to this day.
But it wasn’t just one or two. Israel had a whole arsenal of them – as many as 200, developed in an underground factory beneath the Negev desert – making it the world’s sixth biggest nuclear power.
‘It has almost certainly begun manufacturing thermo-nuclear weapons, with yields big enough to destroy entire cities’, The Sunday Times reported, based on photos and information from Mordechai Vanunu, on October 5, 1986.
A Moroccan-born Jewish man who spent eight years as a nuclear technician in the Dimona secret bunker, Vanunu had grown increasingly sympathetic to Palestinian rights and opposed Israel’s 1982 war in Lebanon.
By the time the story broke, however, the 31-year-old had disappeared. He had left his London hotel in what police described as ‘unexplained circumstances’ on September 30.
At first a friend feared he had been kidnapped from his London hotel, which wasn’t entirely far from the truth.
Israeli intelligence had got its hands on him through a honeytrap designed to avoid souring its relationship with the British government.
In an apparent case of cabin fever after weeks of work on the story, Vanunu ‘began to get impatient’, Andrew Neil, then-editor of The Sunday Times, said.
‘He wandered off and made himself vulnerable.’
So he flew off for a holiday to Rome with Mossad agent Cheryl Bentov, who posed as an American tourist called Cindy to lure him from the safe house right into a taxi waiting outside the airport with two more agents inside.
‘We sat in the back’, he later told the BBC, ‘she used the time for kissing me, to divert my attention by a lot of kissing.’
Once there he was overpowered, drugged and shipped back to Israel to be tried for espionage and treason.
He revealed the truth by flashing words written on his palm and shouting ‘Italy’ to reporters outside a Jerusalem court before police covered his mouth that December.
‘I feel an injustice was committed against him’, his brother Asher said outside a guarded courtroom when Vanunu was jailed in 1988.
‘The trial was not conducted legitimately. No one was inside to see what was going on.’
The kidnapping prompted newspapers that previously ignored The Sunday Times article to start reporting his claims about Israel’s nuclear weapons.
Mr Neil told Sky News: ‘The Telegraph said it was all rubbish. It was only when we learned that Israel was so worried about the story it had sent its secret agents to kidnap Vanunu on British soil in a honeypot trap involving a blonde who said she was from California.’
Vanunu’s decision to snap 57 photos on two rolls of film before quitting his job after eight years in the nuclear weapons plant still costs him his freedom.
Even after spending 11 years in solitary confinement during his 18-year prison sentence, Vanunu lives with heavy restrictions imposed by Israeli courts.
He is so hated by his fellow citizens, his parents disowned him and a crowd gathered outside Shikma Prison to chant ‘Death to traitors’ when he was released in 2004.
But Vanunu remained defiant, saying in an impromptu press conference: ‘To all those calling me a traitor, I’m proud and happy to do what I did.’
Since then, he has faced a one-year ban on leaving the country, talking to foreigners, or approaching embassies or borders, which has been renewed every year.
He must also inform the security services where he lives and who he plans to meet, and have his internet and phone activity monitored.
Vanunu has been repeatedly arrested and jailed for violating these conditions of his release.
Norway has him permission to move there to join his Norwegian wife, but this would require Israel to allow him to leave.
Defending the restrictions at the time of his release, then-Justice Minister .Joseph Lapid said: ‘We think there are things he knows that he hasn’t divulged yet.
‘He may do so – he’s hell-bent to harm this country, he hates this country.’
For Vanunu, however, the ‘secret is dead’. He said: ‘Everything was published.’
Mr Neil agrees, saying: ‘He has no more information. We drained him dry. It was actually because we took so long to interrogate him that he began to get impatient.’
He added: ‘I still have regrets that we could not have done more to keep him out of Mossad’s hands.
‘But I suppose if you’re dealing with the Israeli secret service and you’re just a newspaper then if they want to kidnap your source they will do it.’
On the first day of each month, Vanunu has posted the same message on X: ‘One more year without freedom since 1986-2024, now I am waiting for my freedom, freedom to leave Israel, I will continue to wait until my freedom comes, Born to be free, See you in freedom.’
That was until restrictions were renewed again in July, when Vanunu, who turns 70 next week, said: ‘NEXT POST WILL BE FROM FREEDOM ONLY.’
Israel is now believed to have at least 90 nuclear warheads along with fissile material stockpiles for up to 300 more, but it has never publicly tested them.
An escalating conflict with Iran, which has its own nuclear ambitions, is fuelling fears that Israel’s war in Gaza, which has spread north to Lebanon, will explode into all-out regional war, if not World War 3.
In his first interview after his release in 2004, Vanunu defended his actions, saying: ‘I felt it was not about betraying; it was about reporting. It was about saving Israel from a new holocaust.’
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