-Caveat Lector-
"Vanunu secretly took a set of photographs inside the Dimona reactor and
passed them to The London Sunday Times. Based on those photographs, the Times
wrote in 1986 that Israel had the world's 6th largest nuclear arsenal."
Mordechai Vanunu Remains a Mystery
By RON KAMPEAS
.c The Associated Press
JERUSALEM (AP) - Mordechai Vanunu was a loner with access to Israel's most
guarded secrets, a cheap camera and a determination to tell the world what he
knew about the country's nuclear arsenal.
A partial, heavily censored 1,200-page transcript of the whistleblower's
closed-door trial, made available for the first time last week, reads like a
Le Carre spy thriller where the mystery lies less in the facts than in the
motives.
With the partial publication, apparently permitted to stave off demands for
full disclosure, Israel took another step toward confirming what military
experts and academics have long asserted: the country has a nuclear arsenal.
The testimony of a veteran engineer at the Dimona nuclear reactor settled the
facts of the case easily and early in the 1987-88 trial.
The engineer, called ``Giora'' in the transcript, was asked to look at a set
of photographs Vanunu, a low-level technician at Dimona, secretly took inside
the reactor and passed on to The Sunday Times of London. Based on the
photographs, the Times wrote in 1986 that Israel had the world's sixth
largest nuclear arsenal.
``Are the objects in the pictures objects that exist at the reactor?'' asked
prosecutor Uzi Hasson. A succinct ``yes'' survived an otherwise censored
answer. Would an expert understand what the objects mean? ``Of course,'' said
Giora.
In a tense exchange with Giora, defense attorney Avigdor Feldman asked him if
he understood Vanunu's contention that ``Israel must not hide the fact of its
nuclear weapons from its citizens.''
Giora retorted that it was better for Israel ``that this topic remains where
it is today, or should I say, where it was before the Vanunu affair.''
Probing Vanunu's motives has become the transcript's mystery.
Vanunu has not helped: he has refused to enter a plea. When a judge, swearing
him in, asked him the year of his birth, he offered, ``My identity card says
1954.''
He became expansive only when asked to explain his attraction to a vague
existentialism that he has said led him to reveal the operation of a nuclear
weapons factory he found increasingly dangerous.
``What is `good' must be `good' for all of society,'' Vanunu said.
He revealed a troubled upbringing - an estrangement from his religious
parents, a solitary university existence.
Pressed as to why he became attracted to student politics - a process that
brought him into contact with peace activists and culminated in his decision
to smuggle a camera into his workplace - he retreated again into his wry,
oblique humor: ``Corruption in the cafeteria.''
His prickliness was his undoing when it led him to ignore warnings against a
planned tryst with an attractive American woman, Cindy, he met in London.
Peter Hounam, the Sunday Times journalist assigned to protect him, told the
court that he was suspicious about Cindy and that he asked Vanunu not to go.
Hounam's suspicions were prescient: Cindy was the Mossad agent who lured him
into abduction from Rome to Israel.
It was when Vanunu described his abduction - ordered by then-Prime Minister
Shimon Peres - that he was at his most vulnerable. ``It was just awful. ...
You're kidnapped, abducted, they could execute you,'' he said.
Yet, by the time he landed on an Israeli beach, he was relaxed and harangued
his escorts with no-nukes evangelism - and with his newly discovered belief
in Christianity.
The repeated references to Jesus on the pre-dawn drive from the beach to
Ashkelon prison annoyed one of his interrogators, called ``Yehuda.''
Yehuda did not buy Vanunu's altruism, and was convinced that the Sunday Times
had promised him $100,000 - Hounam's insistence to the contrary
notwithstanding.
``I'm telling you, it was an act of treason by ... a person who is ready to
sell everything, partly for money, partly for status, partly to ease
frustrations and partly to decide that he is something,'' Yehuda said.
By contrast, another interrogator found himself drawn to Vanunu.
``Everyone who dealt with him, even the jailers, established a bond with
him,'' ``Alon'' recalled, and described how he took an interest in Vanunu's
continuing education, bringing him books.
Vanunu, sentenced to 18 years, disappeared into solitary confinement - where
he stayed until 1998. He is now 45 and has five years left in his sentence.
But his country has been unable to shake him.
Peres testified that Norway temporarily suspended the sale to Israel of heavy
water - which can be used in nuclear weapons production - and there was
evidence that Arab states accelerated their nuclear programs. In Washington,
members of Congress started asking hard questions.
Eventually, Vanunu's greatest ambition - nuclear openness - became the fodder
of op-ed articles in the mainstream media.
``Publishing the transcripts is another step in the long road in a
much-needed public debate on Israel's strategic policies,'' Reuben Padhotzer
wrote in Haaretz on Sunday.
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