Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

After a while they parted. Back in the hotel Vanunu confirmed to his minder he had met “an American girl called Cindy.” He said he planned to meet her again. The reporters were worried. One of them said that Cindy’s appearance in Leicester Square might be too much of a coincidence. Vanunu rejected their concerns. Whatever Cindy had said, it had been enough to make him want to plan to spend more time with her—and not in London, but in her “sister’s” apartment in Rome.

Beni Zeevi and four other Mossad katsas were passengers on the flight on which Cheryl and Vanunu traveled to Rome. The couple took a taxi to an apartment in the old quarter of the city.

Waiting inside were three Mossad katsas. They overpowered Vanunu and injected him with a paralyzing drug. Late that night an ambulance arrived and Vanunu was carried on a stretcher out of the building. Neighbors were told by the concerned-looking katsas that a relative had fallen ill. Cheryl climbed into the ambulance, which drove off.

The ambulance sped out of Rome and down the coast. At a prearranged point a speedboat was waiting, to which Vanunu was transferred. The craft rendezvoused with a freighter anchored off the coast. Vanunu was taken on board. Beni Zeevi and Cheryl traveled with him. Three days later, in the middle of the night, the freighter docked at the port of Haifa.

Mordechai was soon facing Nahum Admoni’s skilled interrogators. It was the prelude to a swift trial and a life sentence in solitary confinement. Cheryl Ben-Tov disappeared back into her secret world.

For more than eleven years Mordechai Vanunu remained in solitary confinement in a cell where Israel intended to keep him into the next century. His living conditions were bleak: poor food and an hour’s exercise a day, and he spent his time in prayer and reading. Then, bowing to international pressure, Israel’s government agreed in March 1998 that Vanunu could be moved to less restrictive conditions. However, he has remained an Amnesty International prisoner of conscience and the Sunday Times regularly reminds its readers of his plight. Vanunu received no money for the world-shattering scoop he provided the newspaper. In 1998 he was finally released from solitary but, despite renewed appeals by his lawyers, there seemed little prospect of him being released from prison.

Ten years later, plumper now, her once-styled hair blowing in the Florida sea breeze, Cheryl was back in Orlando, ostensibly on vacation at Walt Disney World with her two young daughters.

Confronted in April 1997 by a Sunday Times reporter, she did not deny her role in the kidnapping. Her only concern was that publicity would “harm” her “position” in the United States.

Ari Ben-Menashe fared less well. He had seen many good men come and go, victims of the constant manipulation within the Israeli intelligence community. But he had never thought his day would come.

In 1989 he was arrested in New York and accused of conspiring “with others” to violate the Arms Export Control Act by attempting to sell C-130 military aircraft to Iran. The planes had originally been sold to Israel.

During the preliminary court hearing the government of Israel said it had “no knowledge” of Ben-Menashe. He produced a file of references from his superiors in the Israeli intelligence community. The Israeli government said they were forgeries. Ben-Menashe satisfied the court they were not. The Israeli government then said Ben-Menashe was “a low-level translator” employed “within” the Israeli intelligence community. Ben-Menashe countered that the nub of the case against him—the sale of the aircraft—had been sanctioned by the Israeli and the U.S. governments. He spoke of “hundreds of millions of dollars worth of authorized arms deals to Iran.”

In Tel Aviv there was consternation once more. Rafi Eitan and David Kimche were both questioned about how much Ben-Menashe knew and how much damage he could do. The responses could only have been less than reassuring. Rafi Eitan said that Ari Ben-Menashe was in a position to blow wide open the U.S./Israeli arms-to-Iran network whose tentacles had extended everywhere: down to Central and South America, through London, into Australia, across to Africa, deep into Europe.

Waiting for trial in the Metropolitan Correction Center in New York, Ben-Menashe was visited by Israeli government lawyers. They offered him a deal: plead guilty in return for a generous financial settlement that would assure him a good life after he came out of prison. Ben-Menashe decided to tell it how it had been. He had started to do so when suddenly, in November 1990, a federal jury acquitted him of all charges.

A number of his former associates in Israeli intelligence felt that Ben-Menashe had been lucky to escape; they would claim that in his attempts to gain freedom he had used what one Mossad officer called “a scatter-gun approach,” by attacking everyone who threatened his freedom. Kimche echoed the fervent hope of many when he later recalled “all we wanted was for him to disappear from our sight. He had set out to damage us, his country and its safety. The man was, and is, a menace.”

But Israel had not counted on the revenge Ben-Menashe took. He wrote a book, Profits of War, that he hoped would have the same effect Woodward and Bernstein achieved with their Watergate exposé that had brought down President Richard Nixon. Ben-Menashe’s self-stated intention was clear: “to right the terrible wrongs of the 1980s and help remove from power those who were responsible.”

In Tel Aviv there were urgent meetings. The question of buying the manuscript and forever locking it away was discussed. It was pointed out that Ben-Menashe had already refused a very large sum—said to be a million dollars—to stay silent; he was unlikely to have changed his mind. The decision was taken that every sayan in New York publishing must be alerted to use every possible means to stop the book appearing. What success they had is debatable, though the manuscript was submitted to several mainstream publishers before being published by Sheridan Square Press, a small New York house.

Ben-Menashe would describe his book as:

a tale of government by a cabal—how a handful of people in a few intelligence agencies determined the policies of their governments, secretly ran enormous operations without public accountability, abused power and public trust, lied, manipulated the media and deceived the public. Last, but not least, it is a tale of war—a war run not by generals, but by comfortable men in air-conditioned offices who are indifferent to human suffering.

Many saw the book as an outrageous act of atonement by its author; others saw it as an exaggerated version of events, with Ari Ben-Menashe at center stage.

In London, as he had done so many times before, Robert Maxwell hid behind the law, threatening to issue writs against anyone who dared to repeat Ben-Menashe’s allegations about him. No English publisher was prepared to defy the tycoon; no newspaper was ready to use its investigative skills to substantiate Ben Menashe’s claims.

Robert Maxwell, like Ben-Menashe had once firmly believed, remained convinced he was invincible for one simple reason. He had become a thief for Mossad. The more he had plundered for them, the greater had grown his belief he was indispensable to the service.

Again, like Ben-Menashe had once said, Maxwell liked to say on his visits to Israel that he too knew where all the bodies were buried. It was a claim that did not go unnoticed in Mossad.

Robert Maxwell, who once fired a reporter who had cheated on his expenses, had been secretly stealing the pension funds of his employees to support Mossad. The wholesale thefts mirrored Mossad’s own ruthless cunning and increasing willingness to take high-risk gambles.