Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

On September 14, 1986, Robert Maxwell called Nahum Admoni on his direct line with devastating news. A freelance Colombian-born journalist, Oscar Guerrero, had approached a Maxwell-owned Sunday tabloid newspaper, the Sunday Mirror, with a sensational story—one which would rip aside the carefully constructed veil disguising the true purpose of Dimona. Guerrero claimed to be acting for a former technician who had worked at the nuclear plant. During that time the man had secretly gathered photographic and other evidence to show that Israel was now a major nuclear power, possessing no fewer than one hundred nuclear devices of varying destructive force.

Like all telephone calls to and from the Mossad chief, this one was automatically recorded. That member of the Israeli intelligence community would later claim the tape contained the following exchange:

Admoni: What is the name of this technician?

Maxwell: Vanunu. Mordechai Vanunu.

Admoni: Where is he now?

Maxwell: Sydney, Australia, I think.

Admoni: I will call you back.

Admoni’s first call was to Prime Minister Shimon Peres, who ordered every step be taken to “secure the situation.” With those words Peres authorized an operation that once more demonstrated the ruthless efficiency of Mossad.

Admoni’s staff quickly confirmed Vanunu had worked at Dimona from February 1977 until November 1986. He had been assigned to Machon-Two, one of the most secret of all the plant’s ten production units. The windowless concrete building externally resembled a warehouse. But its walls were thick enough to block the most powerful of satellite camera lenses from penetrating. Inside the bunkerlike structure, a system of false walls led to the elevators that descended through six levels to where the nuclear weapons were manufactured.

Vanunu’s security clearance was sufficient to gain unchallenged access to every corner of Machon-Two. His special security pass—number 520—coupled with his signature on an Israeli Official Secrets Acts document ensured no one ever challenged him as he went about his duties as a menahil, a controller on the night shift.

A stunned Admoni was told that almost certainly for some months, Vanunu somehow had secretly photographed the layout of Machon-Two: the control panels, the glove boxes, the nuclear bomb-building machinery. Evidence suggested he had stored his films in his clothes locker, and smuggled them out of what was supposedly the most secure place in Israel.

Admoni demanded to know how Vanunu had achieved all this—and perhaps more. Supposing he had already shown his material to the CIA? Or the Russians? The British or even the Chinese? The damage would be incalculable. Israel would be exposed as a liar before the world—a liar with the capability of destroying a very large part of it. Who was Vanunu? Whom could he be working for?

Answers were soon forthcoming. Vanunu was a Moroccan Jew, born on October 13, 1954, in Marrakech, where his parents were modest shopkeepers. In 1963, when anti-Semitism, never far from the surface in Morocco, spilled once more into open violence, the family emigrated to Israel, settling in the Negev Desert town of Beersheba.

Mordechai led an uneventful life as a teenager. Along with every other young person, when his time came he was conscripted into the Israeli army. He was already beginning to lose his hair, making him appear older than his nineteen years. He reached the rank of first sergeant in a minesweeping unit stationed on the Golan Heights. After military service he entered Ramat Aviv University in Tel Aviv. Having failed two exams at the end of his first year in a physics-degree course, he left the campus.

In the summer of 1976 he replied to an advertisement for trainee technicians to work at Dimona. After a lengthy interview with the plant’s security officer he was accepted for training and sent on an intensive course in physics, chemistry, math, and English. He did sufficiently well to finally enter Dimona as a technician in February 1977.

Vanunu had been made redundant in November 1986. In his security file at Dimona it was noted that he had displayed “left-wing and pro-Arab beliefs.” Vanunu left Israel for Australia, arriving in Sydney in May of the following year. Somewhere along his journey, which had followed a well-trodden path by young Israelis through the Far East, Vanunu had renounced his once-strong Jewish faith to become a Christian. The picture emerging from a dozen sources for Admoni to consider was of a physically unprepossessing young man who appeared to be the classic loner: he had made no real friends at Dimona; he had no girlfriends; he spent his time at home reading books on philosophy and politics. Mossad psychologists told Admoni a man like that could be foolhardy, with a warped sense of values and often disillusioned. That kind of personality could be dangerously unpredictable.

In Australia Vanunu had met Oscar Guerrero, a Colombian journalist working in Sydney, while he was painting a church. Soon the garrulous journalist had concocted a bizarre story with which to regale his friends in the raffish King’s Cross quarter of Sydney. He claimed he had helped a top Israeli nuclear scientist to defect with details of Israel’s plans to nuke its Arab neighbors and that, one step ahead of Mossad, the scientist was now hiding out in a safe house in a city suburb while Guerrero masterminded what he called “the sale of the scoop of the century.”

Vanunu was irritated by such nonsensical claims. Now a committed pacifist, he wanted his story to appear in a serious publication to alert the world to the threat he perceived Israel now posed with its nuclear capability. However, Guerrero had already contacted the Madrid office of the Sunday Times, and the London newspaper with a fearless reputation sent a reporter to Sydney to interview Vanunu.

Guerrero’s fantasies were swiftly exposed under questioning. The Colombian began to feel he was about to lose control over Vanunu’s story. His fears increased when the Sunday Times reporter said he would fly Vanunu to London, where his claims could be more fully investigated. The newspaper planned to have the technician questioned by one of Britain’s leading nuclear scientists.

Guerrero watched Vanunu and his traveling companion board the flight to London, his misgivings deepening by the minute. He needed advice on how to handle the situation. The only person he could think of was a former member of the Australian Security and Intelligence Service (ASIS). Guerrero told him he had been cheated out of a world-shaking story, and described exactly what Vanunu had smuggled out of Dimona—sixty photographs taken inside Machon-Two, together with maps and drawings. They revealed beyond a doubt that Israel was the sixth most powerful nuclear nation in the world.

Once more Guerrero’s luck ran out. He had chosen the wrong man to call. The former ASIS operative contacted his old employer and repeated what Guerrero had told him. There was a close working relationship between Mossad and ASIS. The former provided intelligence on Arab terrorist movements out of the Middle East to the Pacific. ASIS informed the katsa attached to the Israeli embassy in Canberra of the call from its former employee. The information was immediately faxed to Admoni. By then more disturbing news had reached him. On his backpacking trip to Australia, Vanunu had stopped over in Nepal and had visited the Soviet embassy in Kathmandu. Had he gone there to show his evidence to Moscow?

It took a Mossad sayan on the staff of the king of Nepal three days to discover that Vanunu’s sole purpose in going to the embassy was to enquire about the travel documents he would need to take a vacation in the Soviet Union at some unspecified later date. He had been sent on his way with a pile of brochures.