The Vanunu Case

Mordechai Vanunu worked at the Negev Nuclear Research Centre outside Dimona for nine years, from 1976 to 1985, as a technician. Before he was laid off in a mass redundancy, he took photographs inside the facility. Dozens of them, showing the equipment and processes of a nuclear weapons program.

Israel had spent two decades telling the United States that no such program existed. As the Dimona case documents, American inspectors had been walked through a building fitted with a fake control room and bricked-over elevator shafts, and had gone home and reported no weapons capability. Vanunu had the pictures of what was actually there.

Publication

He left Israel, travelled to Australia, converted to Christianity, and became increasingly outspoken about proliferation. In Sydney he met Peter Hounam, a journalist from the London Sunday Times, and decided to tell him everything.

In early September 1986 he flew to London and laid it out. The paper, wary of being taken in by a hoax, spent weeks having his account checked by leading experts before it would print anything.

On October 5, 1986 the Sunday Times ran a photograph of the Dimona reactor on its front page and three pages inside. Israel, the paper reported, had an arsenal of around two hundred nuclear warheads. Vanunu’s technical account went further: Israel could build thermonuclear weapons, and had collaborated routinely with South Africa on nuclear matters.

Israel neither denied the story nor said anything about Vanunu. It had no particular need to. By the time the paper appeared, he had been in Israeli custody for five days.

Rome

The operation was codenamed Diamond, and it worked the oldest way there is.

On September 30, 1986, a woman calling herself Cindy, presenting as an American tourist, persuaded Vanunu to travel with her from London to Rome. Her real name was Cheryl Bentov, and she was an American-born Mossad agent.

Hounam later documented what happened when they arrived. In a Rome apartment two men took hold of him, wrestled him to the floor, handcuffed his arms and legs and injected him with a sedative. That night he was carried onto a boat off the coast near La Spezia and taken to Israel.

He was tried behind closed doors on charges of espionage and treason and sentenced to eighteen years. He served all of it. Eleven of those years were in solitary confinement.

Eighteen years, then twenty more

Vanunu was released on April 21, 2004. He said he was proud of what he had done and condemned the conditions he had been held in.

Release did not mean freedom. He was barred from meeting foreigners and from leaving the country, and has been returned to custody for breaching those conditions, on one occasion for having a foreign girlfriend. More than twenty years later he has still not been permitted to leave Israel.

The silence

Here is where this case belongs to the archive rather than to Israeli domestic history.

Vanunu’s photographs proved that Israel had run a sustained deception against American inspectors, defeating an inspection regime that two presidents had fought to establish. He was then abducted from the territory of Italy, a NATO ally, by an intelligence service using an agent operating under American cover, held incommunicado, tried in secret, and kept in solitary confinement for more than a decade.

The United States did not protest the kidnapping. It did not protest the secret trial. It did not protest the eleven years of solitary. There is no record of a formal American diplomatic protest about any part of it.

That silence is consistent with the 1969 Nixon-Meir understanding, under which Washington agreed not to press Israel about its arsenal. Vanunu’s disclosure threatened that arrangement by making the arsenal a matter of public record. The American non-response protected the ambiguity that both governments had agreed to maintain.

Why it matters

The man who proved the United States had been deceived was punished more severely than anyone involved in the deception itself.

Nobody in Israel faced any consequence for lying to American inspectors for twenty years. Vanunu, who told the truth about it to a newspaper, was taken off the street in a NATO country and spent eighteen years in prison, eleven of them alone in a cell, and has spent the two decades since under conditions that still prevent him from leaving.

Throughout all of it, the government that had been deceived said nothing at all. It had made a decision, documented in the Dimona case, that the secret was worth keeping. Keeping it meant that the person who broke it had to be left to his fate, and he was.

Sources

• The Sunday Times (London), “Revealed: The Secrets of Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal,” October 5, 1986
• Peter Hounam, The Woman From Mossad: The Story of Mordechai Vanunu and the Israeli Nuclear Program (Vision, 1999), by the journalist who broke the story
• Peter Hounam, “The Israeli Whistleblower Reaches the End of the Tunnel,” Index on Censorship, Vol. 33, 2004 — first-person documentation of the abduction
• Arms Control Association, “Vanunu Released From Prison,” May 2004
• Al Jazeera, “Israeli Whistleblower Details Kidnap,” March 2, 2004
• BBC reporting on the 1986 Sunday Times revelations and on the 2004 release
• Right Livelihood Award Foundation, Mordechai Vanunu laureate profile