Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

There had never been a scene like it, and it was one that Dagan had difficulty understanding. How could a man who had betrayed his country be treated by anyone as a hero? If Vanunu had done it for money, Dagan had said, that he could almost understand and even accept that Vanunu, once a committed Jew, had converted to Christianity. What the Mossad chief could not understand was the motivation that had driven Vanunu to expose Israel’s prime defense system—the two hundred nuclear weapons that made it the now fourth nuclear power in the world.

Dagan had been part of Israel since its creation, he had played his own part in helping it fight for its place among nations. He believed with passionate conviction that no other people had struggled so much, and for so long, to enlighten others about the moral and spiritual imperatives that govern the ways of mankind. In those long nights when he sat alone in his office reading the incoming traffic from his agents all over the world, his principle article of faith and an inexhaustible wellspring from which he drew his strength was that the State of Israel was the single most important thing in his life.

That was why Vanunu’s great betrayal had preoccupied him. During his imprisonment, Vanunu had filled eighty-seven boxes of documents detailing the production of nuclear weapons at Dimona, out in the Negev Desert. They had, of course, been confiscated on the eve of his release. But what he had put out on paper was to Dagan “proof that Vanunu’s knowledge is still enormous, far too extensive to let him leave Israel.”

That had been one of the conditions accompanying his release; others included that he was not to have contact with foreigners, he would have his Internet and phone calls monitored, and that he would not approach within five hundred meters of any border crossing or foreign diplomatic mission. He would also have a team of surveillance officers close to him day and night.

Vanunu had accepted all the restrictions with a shrug. There had been many other shrugs during Dagan’s final effort to understand his mind-set. The night before his release, two Mossad interrogators had questioned Vanunu on camera about why he had betrayed Israel. He had shrugged them off and launched a strong attack on Mossad and how he had been tricked into captivity. He had spoken of his “cruel and barbaric treatment in prison which was organized and approved by Mossad.”

Now, on the television screen, Vanunu was repeating the same allegations to the cheers of his supporters. To Dagan if “this was a man we had brutalized he looked in very good shape.”

As Vanunu was driven away to pray in St. George’s Anglican cathedral in Jerusalem, Meir Dagan turned back to other matters. Vanunu was free. But he would never be out of Mossad’s grasp.

Like millions of others, “Cindy,” the Mossad agent who had played a key role in the capture of Vanunu in 1986, saw the news of his release on television. She knew that to many Israelis she was still a heroine, someone who had used her guile for a classic sexual entrapment. To others, she remained a Mata Hari, a calculating seductress who destroyed the life of an idealist who felt he was driven by the higher cause of world peace.

But Cindy (the code name she operated under for Mossad) had little to say publicly after she saw Vanunu emerge from his prison. “It’s all in the past. I did my job. End of story,” she said (to the author). Just as Vanunu had spent his long years in jail, reliving what he had done and each time concluding “I did the right thing,” so Cindy had undoubtedly also tried to come to terms with what she had done.

Today she lives in an expensive home beside a golf course twenty-five minutes outside Orlando. She looks good for her age, the color of her hair helped by hairdressing skills to hide the effects of the Florida sun. Deeply tanned, she favors loose-fitting casuals to hide the spread of early middle age. Her two daughters are now teenagers who attend an exclusive private school and never, in public at least, speak about their mother’s past. But friends at the golf club where Cindy enjoys taking lunch say she has developed a real fear that Vanunu or one of his supporters will come and harm her.

Vanunu has denied he has any interest in doing so. “For me, she is just someone who happened. I was young and lonely. She was there. I took her on trust,” was how he summed up the fatal mistake that allowed her to entice him to Rome on the promise of sex. Instead, he fell into the hands of Mossad.

In 2004, Cindy—who is listed in local Orlando records as Cheryl Hanin Bentov—is a Realtor, working with her husband and her mother, Riki Hanin, who lives nearby. All three are active members of their Jewish community. The Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot claimed that “she left Israel to flee the media and the people who burrowed into her life. This bothered her a lot. She was terrified about journalists who came into her home and asked questions. She felt a need to run. Cheryl wants only one thing: a normal, quiet life. She still has shaky nerves as she tried to bury the past. Even relatives who talked about her found themselves banished from the family. She moves between discretion and paranoia.”

If that is true, then it was a high price to pay for becoming Mossad’s most infamous seductress.

On Meir Dagan’s desk was a report from the New York consulate that there was no need for concern over the much promoted CBS television documentary on the death of Princess Diana. The full role of Mossad was still securely hidden and seemed likely to remain so for the foreseeable future. The documentation (which had enabled part of the story to appear in this book) had been sealed in Mossad’s archives with a printed warning on the box. “Not to be opened without prior written order of Director General.”

Of far more concern to Dagan was another report, this one from the Washington embassy, that once more the Bush administration, like its predecessors, was preparing to block the release of a whistleblower as dangerous to America as Vanunu had been to Israel. He was Jonathan Pollard, who was serving a life sentence in a high-security prison in Bulmer, North Carolina, having been found guilty of being the greatest traitor in the history of the United States. Pollard, unlike Vanunu, had been sentenced to die in jail.

Dagan knew the reason for this harsh sentence was the forty-sixpage affidavit Caspar Weinberger, then secretary of defense, had made for Pollard’s trial in 1987. It was so secret that it had never been made public. Every attempt to do so had been blocked by federal lawyers in various Washington courts. In April 2004, the affidavit was still classified “Top Secret Sensitive Compartmented Information” (SCI). This is a restriction to protect the most sensitive data in the U.S. intelligence community.

Dagan believed the affidavit contained crucial details about how Promis software—developed by the specialist Inslaw computer company in Washington and later stolen by Mossad—had been adapted to fit into the artificial intelligence on board U.S. nuclear submarines. The resulting capability was known as “over-the-horizon accuracy,” enabling a submarine to hit targets far within the then Soviet Union and China. The Promis software could program details of the defenses around a target along with the advanced physics and mathematics needed to ensure a direct hit from huge distances.

Dagan also feared the affidavit outlined how Israel had developed its own over-the-horizon accuracy for three German-built nuclear-powered submarines it had bought, based on what Pollard had stolen. Dagan further suspected the affidavit contained details of joint U.S.-British listening posts on Cyprus and in the Middle East, which Pollard had compromised, and revealed how Pollard had also compromised CIA-MI6 operations in the Soviet Union and the former East Germany.